On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 6:25 AM, Jim Connett <jimandmarcy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Finally (and please receive this last point with my highest respect), both
projects appear to be in disarray, but for different reasons. It seems the
docs team has been under the control of just a few people with no real push
(that I've seen) for new volunteers, and the UMP is always welcoming to new
volunteers but is lacking a focused and sustained recruiting effort. I think
it's good to consider if the docs team even wants to merge with the UMP. If
they are not actively seeking help or don't support new volunteers (as
seemed to be the case when Hannie tried to get involved), then the UMP would
be seen as hostile rather than complementary. Additionally, the
organizational structures of the two teams seem to be less defined than
before. In order for any merger to work, I believe one of the two parties
has to be dominant, organized, and confident. I really don't see either of
these teams in that position right now. Given this opinion/perspective, I
think it would be disastrous to merge the two projects.
Just to quickly chime in here - on the Ubuntu Documentation side we've
spent the past year working very hard to document our processes, grow
the team and start welcoming new members again. All administrators of
the project are now active contributors, and while there are still
only a few, that's only because recruiting volunteers is hard and is
no longer because we're just telling people to read a wiki and leaving
them on their own. We still have work to do, but the team is in a much
better place than when UMP was started and it was near impossible for
folks to get involved. Feel free to join #ubuntu-doc to chat with us
:)
We also don't *want* the Desktop guide to be difficult for newcomers
to read, it's just that it's historically been hard to contribute to
so only highly technical people have made contributions - translated:
they tend to write at a higher technical level. So I don't know that
our goals are really that different.
That said, I'd love to see UMP become a part of the Ubuntu
Documentation team, but not merge the Desktop docs with the Manual at
this stage. Simply joining the team would result in the Documentation
team being a structure looking something like this:
Ubuntu Documentation
- Ubuntu Desktop Documentation
- Shipped with Ubuntu
- Published at: https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-help/index.html
- Ubuntu Server Documentation
- Published at: https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/index.html
- Also a .pdf version:
https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/serverguide.pdf
- Ubuntu Community Help Wiki
- Lives at https://help.ubuntu.com/community
- Ubuntu Manual
- Published at ubuntu-manual.org as a PDF and available as printed book
- We could perhaps add a link to a page like this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/index.html
This cycle the Documentation team has been working hard to get
feedback from Ubuntu Developers about new features, so it would be
helpful if we were all together to accept that information for the
updates to Desktop docs and Manual :)
Maybe some day we could talk about merging the Desktop guide and
Manual more officially, but given they are written in different
formats and seem to have different aims, this would take some amount
of work and some major decisions.
