Announcing Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.10, Quickshot v1.0 and The Ubuntu Quickstart Booklet

[Benjamin Humphrey]

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.



--
Benjamin Humphrey

Ubuntu Manual Team Lead
Dunedin, New Zealand

http://www.ubuntu-manual.org
www.interesting.co.nz
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