ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Neil Tallim <red.hamsterx@xxxxxxxxx>]

Redevelopment of Quickshot for its 1.0.0 release should be a much
lighter task, considering everything we've done and learned,
especially with six months to apply polish at our convenience, so I
should be able to volunteer to help enforce style consistency, edit
content, and add supplementary writing to the next version.

-Neil Tallim

On 1 April 2010 01:24, 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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