ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Ilya Haykinson <haykinson@xxxxxxxxx>]

All,

Now that we've hit the writing freeze, we need to consider what the next
steps are for the English language edition.

Clearly, we've accomplished a great deal with the first edition. In a few
months we've gone from almost no content to having a complete manual of 170
pages. I think this is quite an accomplishment for the team, and I would
like to thank and congratulate everyone who's contributed with writing,
editing, technical help, programming, artwork, testing, editing, research,
outreach etc. I think we also owe it to our translation teams, who've been
making progress even as the manual has been undergoing great changes -- and
who have a lot of work in front of them still.

Our manual is of course not perfect, but that was never the goal for the
first edition. If I had to look in retrospect at our mission for this first
edition, it would be "Get Something Out". Yes, we want completeness; yes, we
want high quality. But above everything, we needed to get a decent product
_released_, and I think that this is the overriding theme of the last
several months of work.

I propose that at this point, we start following on three different tracks.

The first track is about finishing the First Edition. There is still work in
getting it translated (indeed, now is the translators' time to shine),
released, promoted, etc -- not to mention any final fixes.

The second track should be releasing a Second Edition for Ubuntu 10.04. If
the first edition's goal was "get something out", I think that the second
edition could have a mission statement of "Raise the Quality Bar". We know
that our manual is not completely perfect -- there are lots of (important)
omissions; there are probably bugs; there are inconsistencies in style,
grammar, voice, etc. For Second Edition, we would work to fix all of these.
We would also not step with just reviewing the work ourselves, but engage
outside resources to help us: we can put an emphasis on testing, and on
processing feedback from the initial release. I would imagine that we could
probably set a goal of an early June release, and deliver a
consistently-written, thoroughly-tested edition for 10.04. Our goal would
not be to add much additional content, but rather to make the current
content consistently great.

The third track should be preparing for a First Edition for Ubuntu 10.10.
While the release cycle for the OS itself will probably kick into high gear
soon after Lucid's release, the following version will not really take shape
for a few months after April 29th. After our own 10.04 Second Edition is
finalized, we can start focusing on things that _we_ want to accomplish for
10.10. I think that the mission for that edition could be "Improve breadth
of coverage". There are some parts that we are missing -- troubleshooting
wireless connections or audio issues, OpenOffice, minor utilities,
additional command line commands, additional hardware. This will be the time
to dive into portions of Ubuntu that the 10.04 versions did not cover, and
make the manual a more comprehensive guide for new users.

In general, I would love for us to take the "get it out" approach of the
current edition and try to transform it into a "make it great" approach for
the second edition, and then further convert it into a "cover more"
approach. If we can accomplish all three goals over time, I think that we
will ensure that our team can ship high quality products, repeatedly.

I'd love to hear comments from everyone on this approach. Please don't
hesitate to reply to the list.

-ilya haykinson