Re: Role and function of the docs team

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Aug 25, 2006, at 10:43 PM, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> This is something that's been on my mind for a while, and I was going 
> to leave it till after the release, but the new default theme is 
> basically the camel's back.

Or the last straw on that back, perhaps. :-)

> ...
> The GDP almost shuts down for months, and then has to go into 
> overdrive to get the work done. Volunteers lose interest when there's 
> nothing to do, and don't necessarily want to work in the few weeks 
> leading to release. It's also stressful and non-fun. We need to spread 
> the workload throughout the cycle.
>
> Reason 2: too much time is wasting feature hunting. Documentation 
> writing shouldn't involve trying every single bit of an application on 
> the offchance something has changed. It's a far more efficient use of 
> our time if we have a list of what's changed.
> ...

Just as an interested observer, maybe there should be less of a "Gnome 
Documentation Project" and more of an expectation of individual help 
teams for individual programs. The writers would still share knowledge 
and coordinate in this mailing list and in #docs, but responsibility 
for good on-screen help (and blame for bad help!) would be the 
responsibility of the module teams themselves rather than the GDP.

In other words, for each proposed module for Gnome, you should be able 
to ask, "who is the maintainer, who is the interaction designer, who is 
the chief QA person, and who is the help author", and get three or four 
distinct answers.

This wouldn't have solved the problem with the default theme, but it 
might have improved the Orca situation.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/