Hey, Sorry if this is long or not what was wanted, but hey, if it is just skip over it! > Fedora 8 is approaching, as it happened in the past, there are very few people > actively working on our Docs -- so few we are thinking of just focusing on > delivering the release notes and install-guide for this release. The Desktop > user guide hasn't even been updated for F7. I did some work on updating this guide in the build up to Fedora 7's release, but I didn't go further because I felt like the goals of the doc/direction it was going in weren't clear and I didn't know what still needed doing. I asked a couple of times, and thanks to jmbuser for providing some pointers Re: this, but I still felt lost in the end, like the guide was aimless. Maybe I should have pushed further, but some other things came up at the same time and my attention was switched. > While it seems that we've got very few contributors, on the other hand, we see a > bunch of people joining the project, posting self introductions that show > willingness to help! Which is great! > > An obvious Question comes in mind then: what are we doing wrong and all you new > contributors aren't involved in a Doc having fun and everything? What didn't you > like when you first joined the project? What did you expect and where did you > get disappointed? Hmm, it's difficult to be specific with this question, but I'll do my best. I came along with a huge amount of enthusiasm (mostly as a result of wanting to give something back for all the software I've had for free, wanting to help others out, the usual reasons) and time. I think initially I did some useful work? I hope so! As time wore on though, I found myself with a bit less time than I had before, and felt a little bit confused about where to contribute. Some of the ideas that were tried, with respect to direction, had real promise I think - the timetable, focusing on one guide at a time etc - but none of them really picked up momentum (see my earlier point about the DUG). Another thing that put me off was the very formal style selected by the project. I appreciate that there are good reasons behind this - consistency, clarity, authoritative tone etc - but it's a bit of a chore to write like that: it doesn't feel natural (maybe just me?), and it's dull to read back. One thing that I think the project should consider, as the wider Fedora project has been discussing lately, is "what is our target audience?": while the formal style is great for docs from Red Hat/Microsoft etc (wow never thought I'd write that!) which are aimed at cooperate users, is it right for $fedora_target_audience - is it suitable for, what is currently a small team, to maintain? Perhaps alternative styles of docs could be tried? I've recently been playing with openSUSE a bit (as a result of the target audience discussions) and found that they've got a project to create community contributed "cook books". A Fedora implementation could perhaps see community contributed recipes, through whatever medium (e-mail even!? legal aside), while the small core team could edit and pull things together (polish), and obviously write recipes themselves!? Other things I think are important I've talked about in the past: clear to-do lists of what needs doing so contributors know what to do etc. I hope this is useful to people? I'd love to start contributing again in the future but starting uni next month may take up some of my time, at least while I get settled; maybe in a few months I can become more active again, and hopefully I won't feel so lost then as well :D Also, my apologies about the Revisor guides - I still hope to be of some use with these in the future! Jon p.s. You guys do great work as it is: rel notes/inst guide/tools etc are superb! -- fedora-docs-list mailing list fedora-docs-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list
