Dear Documentation Team, On behalf of the Ubuntu Manual team, we wanted to reach out to you to start reconciling our two teams' approaches to creating great Ubuntu documentation.
First, a word of deep respect for your work. The Ubuntu Manual Project (UMP) would not exist without you -- we simply would not have a userbase of Ubuntu users without the great help and support tools that you've built over the years that helped nurture people on their path from 'clueless newbie' to involved community members. You've also solved a lot of hard problems related to releasing high quality documentation, on time, release after release after release. Our collective hats off to you! The reason we are writing is that there's been a bit of butting heads between the Docs Team and the UMP team. We've sometimes been too quick to dismiss the complexity of embarking on some of our projects, while we think that you've at times turned slightly too critical of an eye to our 'newcomer' project. We would like to take stock of where we all stand. Clearly, we share a lot of goals and values. We share the goal of educating users about Ubuntu. We all want to improve the comfort in, or the mastery of all subjects of the OS. Both of our projects want our content be accessible to the majority of actual and potential users worldwide. We all want to encourage participation from the larger Ubuntu community. And, finally, we all want to bring together duplicated efforts to ensure a consistent voice, and a collaborative environment of people interested in educating users. At the same time, there are some differences in our approaches as well. Our team feels that there are some unaddressed gaps in Ubuntu documentation. For example, there is a lack of official linear documentation -- a guide, hence the UMP project's manual. There is still a lack of centrally-produced, localized documentation. There is very little visual aid in the docs, and no focus on multimedia. We also felt that the Docs Team's process was somewhat rigid, and too slow for certain types of contributions. While this approach is very consistent with the docs team's emphasis on long-term sustainability and quality of the docs process, there was. in our view. much less emphasis on widening the scope of documentation and simplifying community input. We also felt that there is a place for great tools that could be built to help make the process of contributing much easier. This could take the form of simplified multimedia content creation (cf. the Quickshot tool that we built to simplify capturing screenshots in multiple languages); it could take the form of improving our translation infrastructure or taking advantage of collaborative editing. Finally, and perhaps most acutely, we felt that there is a need to create a top-notch documentation system for public help docs that can replace the help.ubuntu.com model that's somewhat stagnated since Hardy (witness the eerie similarity between https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04 and https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04). Now, and most importantly, please understand that we do not mean that we need to start from scratch -- we do not seek revolution or competition. We do, however, want to achieve our goals, which hopefully means that we find a way to coordinate our work rather than working independently. Here's what we think is necessary for us to work well together. We would certainly like to pursue some improvements to close the perceived gaps in usability, focus, collaboration, etc. Some of this may involve the creation of tools, some of this involves research, and some involves plain old copywriting and maintenance. For the tools portion, we would like to have specific discussions about these tools, namely how to improve the help website, how to merge multiple projects into a single help website, and how to more easily allow community input into the process of writing docs. We would also like to move forward with centrally-managed, localized documentation. What are your thoughts on this matter? How do you think that we can work together? We think that the solution of 'everyone join the existing Docs Team process' is not directly workable, since it's clear we have some cultural and procedural differences right now -- much as having UMP just fork the Docs Team's content is a bad solution. How do _you_ think the UMP team can improve the working relationship between the two approaches? Best regards, ilya haykinson <i...@ubuntu-manual.org> Kevin Godby <ke...@ubuntu-manual.org> Ubuntu Manual Project _______________________________________________ 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
