ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Benjamin Humphrey <humphreybc@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

I don't have much time to write a lengthy email so this is going to be
to the point. As everyone will know, the last 4 months in this team
have been terrible - we've been getting nothing done, the manual for
Maverick is still not out and we're not moving forward. This is
combination of a few things, myself and a lot of the core contributors
have been extremely busy in the second half of 2010, we've been
pushing hard for the Lucid manual and some of us might be a bit burnt
out, our barrier for new contributors is way too high and the demand
for a new manual every 6 months, plus translations and screenshots is
just too much for the team to handle without full time contributors.

Rather than see the team disintegrate, which would be terrible, I
figure we need to slim our goals down a bit and perhaps give us a
greater time span to work in. Hence I propose one (or both) of the
following:

* Not releasing the manual for every release, but perhaps only .04
releases (yearly) or only LTS releases (every two years).
* Releasing only in English, at least until we have a better
infrastructure for translations

My preference would be the first option. I feel that it's not
necessary for us to have a new manual every 6 months, what with the
large amount of documentation and support elsewhere and the fact that
not enough changes every six months to justify a new book. I think
that having our material in other languages is important, but it's
difficult to coordinate such a mammoth task when we have very limited
infrastructure for translation this amount of text.

I believe if we toned down our lofty release goals, we'll have more
time to work on things like the Support and Learning Center, the
personas, quickstart booklets and other things, giving us a better,
more complete and concise product overall, even if it was released
less regularly.

Please let me know your thoughts. We should also have a meeting soon.

-- 
Benjamin Humphrey
interesting.co.nz
ohso.co