The Ubuntu Manual Team have decided on their goals for the Maverick Meerkat 10.10 release at the end of this year. We will continue to strive to make quality educational materials, to be an interesting project with a low barrier to entry and to use the latest technologies and develop our own applications and tools to help us achieve our overall mission as a project. Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is going to be re-released as a one-off Second Edition at the end of July with an emphasis on fixing all the bugs that we didn't manage to fix for the First Edition and including some important content that we just didn't have time for this cycle. We set the bar as high as we can and we want to produce the best quality material possible. We want to have documentation that can not only compete with Ubuntu's competitors, but completely destroy their offering so Ubuntu truly will be the easiest Operating System to learn and get help for. To get to this stage we have to be very strict on our quality control process and work closely with all other educational teams in the community. I have personally set the target of a 100% error free manual to be available as the Second Edition in July, and this target will continue for every release. We won't settle for anything less than 100% quality, as time goes on our products will become more refined, they'll cover more topics, be available in more formats and hopefully help out thousands of users around the world. To keep the momentum in our project, we will be releasing some new materials for Ubuntu 10.10, including two variants of an Ubuntu Quickstart booklet designed for LoCo teams to print and use at events as well as a version optimized for inclusion on the Ubuntu CD. We will also be improving Quickshot and releasing v1.0, which will bring many bug fixes and extra features including easy configuration of server settings so other projects can make use of this fantastic application to capture localized screenshots. As well as producing more documentation and improving existing materials, we will be working very closely with the Ubuntu Learning Materials project where we will be working together to create classroom lessons designed for use in a teacher-student scenario, both in real life and in IRC via applications like Jono Bacon's Lernid. We will also like to work closely with the Ubuntu documentation Project to work on the in-built system docs, and wiki documentation, as well as the Ubuntu Forums Council to see what we can do to improve a new users experience. Inside our team, a greater focus will be put on improving our own workflow to make sure we are working at full efficiency and potential. We will be looking into developing our own customized bug reporting system using the Launchpad API, as well as developing easier installation methods for the latest versions of LaTeX and working on our web presence where development will continue on our website and migration away from the Ubuntu wiki. We will continue to improve language support, currently we support 55 languages with more being added everyday. We will be conducting more research and gathering feedback on how our project has run so far and observing how the community receives the first edition of Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04, then basing some of our future plans off this feedback. We should continue towards our goal of making our project the easiest and most exciting Ubuntu project to be involved in. We should make it incredibly easy for new contributors to learn the ropes, we should have regular help sessions and classes on things like LaTeX and Python to encourage users of all skill levels and expertise to help out, with the promise of them learning something and having fun while doing so. We want to include everyone and regardless of their skill set or experience level, we will find something for them to do. Ohloh.net suggests that our team is “one of the largest open-source teams in the world” and in the top 2% of all open source projects in terms of active development and branch commit frequency. Our team fully intends to keep expanding and working closely with other Ubuntu teams in the community to make the Ubuntu experience as perfect as we can for new users and I think what you have already seen from the Ubuntu Manual Project is just the beginning.<div> </div><div> -- Benjamin Humphrey Ubuntu Manual Team Lead Dunedin, New Zealand <a href="http://www.ubuntu-manual.org">http://www.ubuntu-manual.org</a> <a href="http://www.interesting.co.nz">www.interesting.co.nz</a> </div>