Re: Getting involved.

[Alexander A Kirillov <kirillov IAS EDU>]

Hi,
I was waiting for one of the coordinators (Miguele, Dave...) to answer
your question, but apparently they are busy with other things to
do. So, I dare give my suggestions; while I am not authorized to speak
for the coordinators, I hope they will agree to these suggestions. 

So: first of all, thanks for your offer - we do need help! There are
several way in which you can help: 

1. The easiest way to get started is to help improving existing
documentation. Choose any piece of documentation (users-guide, docs
for electric eyes, gnumeric, gnome-terminal,...) and look through it carefully
looking for confusing explanations, missing parts, awkwardly worded
phrases, typos, etc (I am afraid, they are not hard to find) and send
them to the authors or maintainers of the documentation. It would be
best if you not only point out things that need to be corrected, but
also suggested a way to do it - rewriting a whole section if it needs
be. 
 The authors may not always answer the e-mails, but they do read them
and try to correct things - I was pleasantly surprised when I send
some comments to Dave and in two weeks, having downloaded the new
version of users-guide, found many of these changes incorporated
there. 

2. There are many components of GNOME which have no online documentation at
all - many of the capplets and useful utilities such as font and color
selectors and gtop, to name a few. If you are actively using them and
think that you understand the way they work - you do not have to be a
programmer to do this - you can write the documentation for one of
them. You have to be familiar with SGML DocBook format, used by gnome
documentation (take a look at one of the existing documents to get
started).   Of course, before doing that you have to get in touch with the
developer/maintainer of the application itself; most of them would be
only too happy to hear that someone wants to help them with the
documentation. 


	Thanks!

		Sasha
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   Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 10:23:32 -0400
   From: Mack Sessoms <chuggie@localhost.cdc.gov>
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   I'm a year and a half old in the linux community.  I'm not a
   programmer.  I use gnome on RH 5.2.  I've recently learned (Salon
   article w/Miguel de Icaza and David Mason) that I may be able to
   contribute to one of the documentation projects that needs help.  What
   are the steps?

   Mack