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Re: Writing freeze: Congrats, and next steps

 

I also agree, Ilya put it just the right way, its a +1 from me too.

Ryan Macnish

Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2010 22:29:35 +1300
From: humphreybc@xxxxxxxxx
To: haykinson@xxxxxxxxx
CC: ubuntu-manual@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Ubuntu-manual] Writing freeze: Congrats, and next steps

This sounds great, exactly what we should be doing. Definitely a +1 from me.

Thanks for taking the time to describe it in detail Ilya, this will be very useful as a basis to start discussion about the future!

Cheers,

Benjamin


On 1/04/2010 8:24 PM, "Ilya Haykinson" <haykinson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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


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