ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Josh Holland <jrh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[CCing BH directly to make sure it's nice and prominent in his inbox]

Hi Manual-ers,

I'm writing this email with not a little bit of concern. It's now the
7th of August, barely more than 2 months to the release of Ubuntu 10.10
"Maverick Meerkat", and the project feels a bit dead.

I'm not trying to pin the blame on anyone in particular, but I think the
reasons for this are that certain people whose enthusiasm was the
driving force behind the success of the Lucid edition seem to be
spending more time writing controversial blog posts, and also the fact
that we have not had a meeting in quite some time.

Personally, I understand that I am poor at motivating myself to do
stuff. What I think we need is a meeting ASAP to get things moving
along. Unfortunately, I'm starting to come up to a pretty busy set of
holidays with dubious internet access, so it is going to have to be
*really* soon. I'm going away Monday evening, and will not be back until
the weekend. It's then a pretty busy week including A level results (and
associated celebrations/commiserations) on Thursday and a trip out with
the Ubuntu UK folks on Saturday. Ideally, then, we could have the
meeting at some point this Monday (the 9th). I'm free all day up to
around 5.30 pm BST, so for now, I'm going to tentatively schedule the
meeting for 1500 UTC in #ubuntu-manual. Please reply to this thread if
that's unacceptable, but the important thing is to get the core team
members there.

The agenda will include:
 * Whether to continue with Lucid edition 2 or move straight on to
   Maverick
 * Whether it is practical to continue to wait for the collaboration
   meeting with the Docs/Learning team before writing more content
 * Documenting the release process more publicly and in more depth
 * Detailing the process for translations

When the project was initially formed, a lot of the controversy was not
only over whether we were filling a space that was already full, but
whether we could keep our momentum up for future releases. It's a shame,
but a lot of the prophecies are coming true. We need to get working hard
now, or it could reflect badly on the whole team.

-- 
Josh Holland <jrh@xxxxxxxxxxx>