Some ideas

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

Hi,

First of all great job!!

Now that there are lots of ideas on improving, re-focusing and revamping
the documentation I will put here some ideas that I had some time ago
when I first heard of moving from descriptive to topic based
documentation (great change!).

I don't know if it's the approach you want to take but shouldn't be
useful to try to create skeletons of documentation (that is, what topics
should be covered for each documentation) just as placeholders, make
them as narrow or focused as possible and try to get as much skeletons
as possible for say 3.0 and then start campaigning (a-la GHOP) to get
more and more bodies coming to life :D

That way it would be easier to ask maintainers/power-users (which will
be the ones that tries early versions of the softwares) what they think
it could be useful to know (i.e. the bones) and then after the
brainstorming having a nice way to contribute those muscles to make the
bones filled (write the text on a bug-report, on the wiki, on the
revamped website, inside Yelp itself and having a-la bug-buddy bugs
filled, whatever).


Now, the other way around:

If the idea is to ask the users what they would expect instead of trying
to guess (as it was on the previous idea) wouldn't be useful to use the
new revamped GNOME website to have weekly/bi-weekly/monthly surveys
(with advertisements on p.g.o, irc and wherever possible) on a specific
topic/application to get feedback?

Or maybe, even it would be useful to log what users are searching on
Yelp and send it somewhere (I'm not taking care here of data gathered by
the application) to process it. 

I was about to send all this ideas on the Mallard thread but I thought
they are more general than the specific way the documentation is handled
internally.

Cheers,

-- 
gil forcada

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