Request for Ubuntu Doc Leadership
Hannie Dumoleyn
lafeber-dumoleyn2 at zonnet.nl
Fri Mar 18 09:52:51 UTC 2016
Op 17-03-16 om 20:00 schreef Pasi Lallinaho:
> Hello Hannie and Svetlana,
>
> it is essential that this particular meeting gathers all contributors
> from all three teams together. The intention is to about to talk about
> the future of the whole documentation team, for example improvements
> to the governance that are essential to make the team able to work -
> and ultimately grow - again.
Hello Pasi,
I understand that it is better to have a meeting with all members of the
ubuntu-docs team. At the same time, I have thoughts on splitting up to
make things work better (not sure if it will work). To give you an
example: I highly appreciate the work Peter, Doug and others do for the
server guide, but personally, I have no interest in the server guide
because I do not use ubuntu-server. It is not my intention to start a
discussion on this here, but perhaps we can talk about it at the
meeting. I have added this to the agenda.
>
> Doodle should try to auto-adjust the time for your timezone (it should
> even mention that), but if it doesn't, it's likely UTC. FWIW, the
> times are (in 24-hour format UTC):
> - Friday, March 18, 15:30 UTC (that's tomorrow)
> - Tuesday, March 22, 18:00 UTC
> - Thursday, March 24, 14:30 UTC
Thanks for the tip. I now see the time is adjusted to my time zone. Like
we say in my language: I did not look further than the length of my nose ;)
Hannie
>
> Cheers,
> Pasi
>
> On 2016-03-17 19:49, Svetlana Belkin wrote:
>> That might not work so well but that's maybe because i had hard time
>> running meetings in the past in the doc team.
>> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016, at 01:34 PM, Hannie Dumoleyn wrote:
>>> May I suggest to divide the meeting with the docs team in 3 parts:
>>> 1. desktop documentation, 2. server guide, 3. community help wiki
>>> (30 minutes each). By doing so, attendants can decide whether to
>>> follow each part or not.
>>> Btw, I suppose the time in Doodle is UTC?
>>> Hannie
>>> Op 16-03-16 om 19:30 schreef David Planella:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> Apologies for the delay, which was on my end. We've been discussing
>>>> the topic on our team call and we'd like to propose a meeting with
>>>> the docs team. While the original e-mail covers the issue in great
>>>> detail, and we've got some ideas, we'd like to get the doc's team
>>>> views and come up together with a plan moving forward.
>>>> I'd like to propose some dates for a meeting, to be reviewed around
>>>> the end of the week to pick a date. If you are a member of the docs
>>>> team or if you are interested to help, please choose the date(s)
>>>> that work for you. If you are willing to attend and the timezones
>>>> are an issue, please let me know as well, and I can add an extra
>>>> choice:
>>>> http://doodle.com/poll/dqsryhnkfwgantb2
>>>> And an initial agenda (feel free to edit):
>>>> http://pad.ubuntu.com/doc-team
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> David.
>>>> On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 12:03 AM, Elizabeth K. Joseph
>>>> <lyz at ubuntu.com <mailto:lyz at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello community team,
>>>> We are approaching you on behalf of the Ubuntu Documentation
>>>> team to
>>>> ask for assistance with the issues the team is undergoing.
>>>> The Ubuntu Documentation team maintains the following
>>>> documentation:
>>>> – The desktop documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/
>>>> – The serverguide at https://help.ubuntu.com/
>>>> – The community help wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/
>>>> We maintain documentation for how this documentation is
>>>> maintained at
>>>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam
>>>> The team is loosely organized in three subteams, each team
>>>> taking care
>>>> of one of the components mentioned above. In each team we have
>>>> only a
>>>> few people that can be considered active; some of those only
>>>> barely.
>>>> The state of all of the components can be described to be more
>>>> or less
>>>> stalled and in desperate the need of more contributors. With the
>>>> string freeze for Documentation just a couple weeks away (March
>>>> 17),
>>>> at this point we risk not having updated documentation for 16.04,
>>>> particularly for the Desktop.
>>>> In the case of the community help wiki, the situation is even
>>>> worse;
>>>> not only has it encountered spam attacks lately (which only
>>>> mean more
>>>> work for the admins, who have been manually applying documentation
>>>> "patches" that contributors send to the ubuntu-doc mailing
>>>> list), it
>>>> also has a lot of content that is completely outdated, useless and
>>>> unstructured. Due to the spam attacks, most community members can't
>>>> currently take any action to improve the situation.
>>>> Following a meeting with the Community Council[0], we have begun to
>>>> identify what we feel the team needs, both in the short and
>>>> long term.
>>>> We believe one of the major underlying issues to this situation
>>>> is the
>>>> teams inability to make decisions. The active and not so active
>>>> team
>>>> members all have their own opinion on which tasks are sensible
>>>> to take
>>>> on a certain component. This is especially problematic as
>>>> sometimes we
>>>> have had volunteers signed up to do the work, but the team has
>>>> wanted
>>>> to consider the issue further, ultimately stalling the process.
>>>> When
>>>> most efforts to improve the situation seem to be in vain, it is no
>>>> wonder the team is not attracting new contributors either.
>>>> As the Documentation team does not have a leader to steer the
>>>> overall
>>>> direction, there is no way to easily resolve the problem.
>>>> Additionally, for various reasons, nobody from the current
>>>> contributors is willing to step up and take the leadership
>>>> position.
>>>> Our request and recommendation for the community team at
>>>> Canonical is
>>>> to bring some leadership to the team from outside of the team.
>>>> Ideally, the person would be a Canonical employee who would
>>>> have part
>>>> of their paid work assigned to working with the Documentation
>>>> team. We
>>>> think the request is fair considering the documentation is
>>>> important
>>>> and useful to many Ubuntu users and thus valuable to Canonical.
>>>> We believe that a stable, fresh and adequately objective leadership
>>>> could help the team resolve the underlying issues and ultimately,
>>>> start growing the contributor base again. As part of and in
>>>> addition
>>>> to leading and guiding the team, the leader could take on the
>>>> following tasks:
>>>> – Work as a mediator with the members to resolve disagreements, be
>>>> able to reach a consensus and get along with the work
>>>> – Work with other Canonical employees, encouraging them to take
>>>> part
>>>> more in writing documentation, especially with the components
>>>> they are
>>>> working with themself
>>>> – Work with the Canonical IS team to resolve technical difficulties
>>>> the community help wiki is experiencing
>>>> We feel their role as a leader on this team would not be
>>>> because they
>>>> work for Canonical, but because they are able to do the
>>>> organizational
>>>> work that is needed. Anyone able and willing to do this would be
>>>> welcomed by us and the rest of the Documentation team. It's simply
>>>> come to a point on the team today where we are not able to fill
>>>> this
>>>> role with a volunteer contributor.
>>>> We do not think that the recommended arrangement has to be
>>>> permanent
>>>> unconditionally. Building up a team and getting it working by
>>>> itself
>>>> sometimes takes only time. We hope that with the leadership,
>>>> the team
>>>> can build up the contributor base and ultimately, find a new leader
>>>> from within. If a leader is nominated, we will happily schedule a
>>>> checkup meeting to see how things are going, if there are other
>>>> actions that should be taken to grow and build up the team and
>>>> if the
>>>> outside leadership is required any more.
>>>> Finally, we'd be happy to chat with anyone wishing to take on this
>>>> role about the history of the team to give them some context
>>>> for how
>>>> we got to where we are. The Documentation team has always been
>>>> quite
>>>> small and has struggled to get contributors, but it was with
>>>> this LTS
>>>> release that we have finally hit a breaking point.
>>>> Sincerely,
>>>> Elizabeth K. Joseph (pleia2) and Pasi Lallinaho (knome)
>>>> [0]
>>>> http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2016/03/03/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t17:00
>>>>
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>> Svetlana Belkin
>> A.K.A: belkinsa
>> User Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/belkinsa
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Pasi Lallinaho (knome) »http://open.knome.fi/
> Leader of Shimmer Project »http://shimmerproject.org/
> Ubuntu member, Xubuntu Website Lead »http://xubuntu.org/
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