Documentation Team Report - 2009 Q2

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

In April 2009, Shaun McCance sent an email outlining the steps
we need to take to revamp our documentation and our team to
better help our users.  These plans began to be realized by
June 2009, when four members of the documentation team attended
the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound, Canada.

The results of the conference were amazing.  Paul Cutler, Phil
Bull, and Milo Casagrande each stepped up to help Shaun with
team leadership, and we have since held regular meetings for
planning and community involvement.  We've also become part
of a larger open source documentation community, which will
help us produce better documentation.

Support for Mallard documents was landed in Yelp, and team
members began producing Mallard-based topic-oriented help
for Empathy.  This real-world usage of Mallard has helped
further shape it into a viable solution for our team.

The team has also decided on the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license for
all newly produced work.  This alleviates many issues we've
had with licenses in the past and helps us collaborate with
our downstream distributors.

In Q3, we hope to continue the momentum we've started by
continuing to produce topic-oriented help and developing
missing functionality in Mallard.  With four team leaders,
we're better able to teach new contributors and grow our
team.  New contributors will be essential to the long-term
success of our efforts.

--
Shaun