Documentation Team Steering Committee

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Some of you may remember way back in September 2003, when our once
and future Fearless Leader John Fleck stepped down to pursue a book
idea[1] and officially appointed me as his successor[2].  It's been
a long and bumpy ride, and I treasure the experiences I've had.

But it's become obvious to me that one man cannot handle the amount
of community management we need, especially when that one man also
works on the hacking end of things.  For a truly successful team,
we need people actively involved in working with writers.  This is
a very time consuming job, and I believe that we as a team can do
better than what I can do alone.

For this reason, I am officially announcing the Documentation Team
Steering Committee.  The Steering Committee will initially consist
of me, Paul Cutler, Phil Bull, and Milo Casagrande.  Some of you
may know already that the four of us recently attended the first
Writing Open Source conference[3].  The experiences we took away
from that event were amazing, and we will do our best to share what
we've learned with the team.

Here are a few of the things the Steering Committee is responsible
for:

Community management - Welcoming new members to our community and
staying in contact with people.  Making sure our team is a vibrant
place where people love to write.

Editorial assistance - Helping writers in the planning stages of
their documentation.  Passing our experiences on to others.

Reviews - Performing and coordinating reviews to ensure that our
documentation is the best it can be.

Upstreaming downstream - Keeping in contact with our downstream
distributors and making sure we're meeting each others' needs.

And, of course, it's everybody's job to write.

The Steering Committee will be holding monthly IRC meetings on
the last Sunday of each month.  Everybody is welcome to join
these meetings, but please bear in mind that we must keep the
channel on-topic for the duration of the meetings.

We will also be holding weekly community meetings.  These will
be at rotating times to try to accommodate people across the
world.  Community meetings will be open sessions for anybody
interested in writing.

Announcements will, of course, always be made on this list.
We'll also make announcements in our blogs, microblogs, and
anywhere else we can make noise.

These are exciting times, and I hope everybody will become
more active in our team, and encourage their friends and
colleagues to do so as well.


John handed me Excalibur.  It's time we had a round table.
Everybody please help me welcome these amazing guys, and
let's get rocking on our documentation.

--
Shaun

[1] Pre-order John's book today!
http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Rings-Tale-Understanding-Changing/dp/0826347576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245207000&sr=8-1

[2]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2003-September/msg00058.html

[3]
http://writingopensource.com/