Hi, On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:33 AM, Benjamin Humphrey <humphre...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you don't believe that this project will be successful, then > unfortunately that is your problem - I wrote a very nice email to the docs > team expressing interest to collaborate and offered you basically unlimited > use of our resources and material, but the reply I get still doubts our > project - fair enough, if that's how you feel then you'll have to wait and > see.
It's not that we're "not interested" in your project (to use your words from another email). The way I would put it, at least from my perspective, is that we recognise your enthusiasm and would like to find a way to channel that in the most effective way to achieve your objectives and ours. Don't forget that we have been around for quite some years and have quite a lot of experience with documentation projects. It's easy to simply talk about collaboration in an offhand way, and of course projects with identical free licenses are always able to help themselves to material created by other projects (you're welcome to do it with our material and vice versa, provided that the license is respected) it's a lot more difficult to actually sit down and think about whether the projects have really got different aims or not. Because what you've done is start a project that is creating material from scratch using a different type of text markup in circumstances where the Ubuntu system documentation is aimed at the same audience and covers the same subjects. And while I do appreciate your effort to get in touch with the team, because that's more than others have done in the past, it's not *real* collaboration. You're quite right that there is no concept of "official" in the Ubuntu community and that the word is relatively meaningless. But you do bandy the word around quite a bit in your wiki pages and you do aspire to include the material on the Ubuntu system. If that's a genuine aspiration, I really think you do need to engage with the points that have been made. In particular, Phil has already expressed concern about including a set of material with Ubuntu systems that overlaps so heavily with the system documentation provided. I share that concern. Another concern is that the system documentation has a careful process of quality control, whereas the ubuntu-manual bzr branch can be written to by any member of the ubuntu-manual team, which is an open team with 130 members. A very open system obviously has advantages (like our wiki) but in my opinion it's not suited to inclusion of material on every Ubuntu system. There have been plenty of "unofficial" documentation projects in the past. ubuntuguide.org is one of the more prominent ones. Others are listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/IndependentDocEfforts, along with the reasons why we try to discourage them if we can. In the end we can't stop independent documentation efforts, and all we can do is to encourage them to contribute directly to the Ubuntu Documentation Team and try and take on board criticisms that are made of what we do. So you're quite right that no one can stop your project, and no one here is suggesting that. But I do think that if you take on board what we are saying based on our experience, it will benefit everyone. -- Matthew East http://www.mdke.org gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual Post to : ubuntu-manual@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
