Re: Contribution of Sun documentation team to the GDP.

[Patrick Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

All,  

Thanks for your understanding for the difficult decision we have had to
reach. Just to be absolutely clear about our continued involvement in GNOME
documentation, though, I'd like to make the following statements: 

- We are still interested in doing a limited number of Help manuals for the
GNOME 2.8 Desktop and future releases, although nowhere near as many as we
have done in the past. 

- We will still be actively involved in developing terminology, as this
topic remains just as vital for us even if we are working on applications
or a Desktop one or two releases in arrears. 

- We will still be putting back all the work we do, either into the
relevant branch of GNOME CVS or /contrib, depending on which is the most
appropriate. 

- We will be ready to share our knowledge and experience with other
contributors who take over jobs that we have worked on up to now. 

The six month cycle between major GNOME Desktop releases is fairly
gruelling, so I think we had better set about re-assigning responsbilities
for documentation right away. The first thing that we need to do, in my
opinion, is sort out the planning. We should all be working from the same,
agreed planning system. Personally, I don't care if this is the existing
Doctable, or a more dynamic system such as Shaun indicated in January. 

If we stay with the Doctable type of planning, then the current method of
simply adding a new column for each release is not appropriate for the
rapid cycle of six-monthly releases that we now have to cater for. Also, as
we now know from experience, the author of a manual can vary from
release-to-release, so the current method of planning is too static over a
number of cycles. If we stay with the Doctable approach, then I would
suggest creating a new Doctable-X.x.html at the start of each new cycle.
This would prompt us as a community to ask authors at the start of each
cycle if they are going to continue looking after a specific job, or not.
This would also be a regularly-occuring, natural opportunity for new
authors to become actively involved. 

Once everyone has settled on an agreed form of planning for 2.8 and future
releases, then we, i.e. the Sun documentation team, will put our hands up
for the jobs we are still interested in doing. 

The one job that I think really needs an owner right away is the GNOME
Desktop User Guide. This time around Brian Casey did a heroic job trying to
document as much as possible of the new Nautilus functionality in time for
the 2.6 release. However, due to the amount of work involved and the
limited time, there were things that Brian didn't get around to doing. This
would be the right place for someone to start work on to be sure that we
have an up-to-date 2.8 user guide when release time rolls around. Brian can
give some pointers about what still needs to be done. Not a job for someone
new to technical writing or the GNOME Desktop, however. 

I think we can limit this discussion to the gnome-doc-list from now on. The
developer community is sufficiently informed of what is going on. 

Pat

John Fleck wrote:
> 
> Pat -
> 
> Thanks for the frank note. I am not surprised that y'all have been
> forced to this uncomfortable decision. It's been clear, in watching how
> hard your team has been working, that meeting the two overlapping
> release schedules has been a huge burden.
> 
> The Sun documentation team has provided a strong body of documentation
> from which to work. We have had quite a few new volunteers recently
> looking for a way to contribute to documentation. This provides an
> opportunity for the new folks to get involved, taking responsibility for
> a document and updating it for the 2.8 release cycle.
> 
> If the individuals who take over responsibility for community release
> documentation for each app and document can establish lines of
> communication with their counterparts on the Sun docs team, this can
> work to achieve much of what Mark suggested. When you have documentation
> updated on your schedule that is useful to the community, it could be
> integrated into the community docs.
> 
> This will have the added benefit of addressing a problem that we have
> had for the last several release cycles: when new folks want to
> contribute to documentation, there's not been much for them to do,
> because the Sun team has been doing so much of the work themselves. As
> problems go, this has been a good one, but a problem nevertheless.
> 
> The details of managing this will need to be worked out (that's probably
> better done as a separate discussion on the docs list), but I think it
> is manageable.
> 
> Cheers,
> John

-- 
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Patrick Costello, GNOME Documentation
Phone: 		01 819 9077 [ext 19077]
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