Re: Hello, world!

[Don Scorgie <Don Scorgie org>]

Hi David,

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 10:17 -0700, David Delony wrote:
> My name is David Delony and I'm a student California State University
> East Bay. I'm majoring in mass communication, but I also love playing
> with computers. I want to see Free and open source software to succeed,
> so I want to make it more accessible to people who aren't computer
> scientists. I'm interested in writing documentation for nontechnical
> users.

It really depends what you want to write ;)  We have a number of manuals
that haven't been updated in a few cycles.  Unfortunately, we don't
really have a "status tracker" for documentation yet (/me looks around
for anyone wanting to do it).  There are a few ways to get into
documentation, depending on you're style and what you want to do:

a) If you want to work on the documentation for a specific application:
Load up the manual in yelp, have a read through.  Try and find things
that are wrong / could be improved.  Have a look at the (documentation)
bugs for the product [1], try and tackle a few of them.  Bugs with a
heart next to them are "gnome-love" bugs, designed as a good
introduction.

b) If you don't really mind what you work on:
Pick a manual from yelp that sounds interesting to you and repeat (a).

c) If you want to write "howto"'s or tutorials:
Sorry, I'm a little out of my depth with this but ... You could pick a
topic that comes up regularly (check mailing list archives, forums etc.)
and write a guide on live.gnome.org [2] and advertise it to people.

d) If you want to do something totally off-the-wall / something not
covered above:
Write it up in a proposal to this mailing list and / or come onto IRC
and discuss it with us [3].

For (a) and (b), we are currently using docbook for our documentation.

There is a bit more info on the wiki pages [4] and [5].  I'd recommend
starting there.  There are usually (sometimes) people hanging around in
the IRC channel that can direct you and answer questions.  Note it may
take some time to answer you're question though.

Hope this is of some (marginal) help.  I'm sure other people can be of
greater help.  If you have questions, please feel free to ask them here
or on IRC.

Thanks and welcome onboard :)
Don

[1] Usually under the "docs" component for the product on
bugzilla.gnome.org
[2] http://live.gnome.org/WikiCourse/ gives a brief introduction to wiki
editing and syntax
[3] irc.gnome.org, #docs
[4] http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject
[5] http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Contributing