<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000099"> I also think this is a great move. I've been on the sidelines wanting to contribute for 2 years, but the learning curve has been steeper than I had time for. Anything that reduces that has my support. And it's great to see involvement / recognition from the greater Ubuntu community. On 22/06/11 23:37, Jono Bacon wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:1308749857.14017.26.camel@forge" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hi Everyone, I hope everyone is doing well. :-) Before I begin, I want to apologize. With the Ubuntu community being such a large community with so many different teams, my efforts have traditionally been focused on other areas than the docs team. I have been aware of much of the work of the team, but I and my team have often had little time to spend helping the docs team achieve it's goals. Shortly before UDS, Jim Campbell wrote an excellent blog post about the docs team, and I had seen his good work before. I sponsored him to UDS to come and talk more about docs, and at UDS I had lunch with him to start growing a relationship. I committed to Jim that I want to help see the docs team thrive in the 11.10 cycle, and Jim and I are having some regular calls where we can sync up on what is going on with the team. We had a call recently and discussed some of the challenges that the team has and how we can break them down and resolve these issues. The key challenge from what I can see is (a) the discover-ability of usefulness of documentation (i.e. ensuring people can find help for the problems they might have), and (b) how easy it is to participate in the docs team and contribute to documentation. For (a), Jim and I looked at support.mozilla.com as a great example of a well organized and run support resource. I would love to see this kind of resource at help.ubuntu.com. The Mozilla Support site is run using Sumo which works very much like a wiki - contributors can contribute work to the resource, and it has a built-in translations facility (which is obviously important for the global reach of Ubuntu). For (b), from what I can tell, participating in the docs team is not as simple as it could be. On one hand there are official docs at help.ubuntu.com, and then wiki orientated docs at help.ubuntu.com/community/ - I would love to see how we can lower the bar here. So, I have a few proposals I wanted to share with the team to gather feedback on: * We migrate to Sumo and this be the new help.ubuntu.com. This would involve a migration process (setting up a test server, theming it etc ensuring that authentication with Launchpad works etc). * We govern the site in much the same way Wikipedia works - anyone can contribute if they register an account, and the docs teams helps to moderate content and contributions, and lock down certain pages where required. I believe that these two goals will result in a more useful help.ubuntu.com and an easier and more effective way of people contributing. Do you folks believe this could be a good step forward? I know it would be different, and change can be worrying, but I believe we can re-energize the docs team and our docs story with this approach, Would someone be interested in setting up a Sumo server so we can play with it, add some sample content, and take it from there? Thanks, Jono </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>