Minutes of the 5th documentation team meeting

The agenda of the meeting can be found at DocumentationTeamMeeting20050616.

The fourth documentation team meeting began at 2200 UTC, April 16 2005.

IRC logs are available here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Active participants:

These topics were on the agenda:

• Review status of documents for Breezy targets: DocteamProjects

• Completion of the Style Guide and how to adopt it into our existing and future documents
• Create roadmap for future docteam - developer - community relations in future projects with the help of the Community Council
• Fix process for granting SVN access rights to new members

• Revisit doc planning and release. These issues were discussed at previous meetings, but as yet no decisions have been made. See the "Phases of documents" section on DocumentationTeamMeetingSummary3.

Style of this summary: this summary lists the conclusions and consensus reached during the meeting. People are mentioned by their first names, except where this might cause confusion, in which case it is "firstname (nick)".

Projects

Recognised Projects

These can be found at DocteamProjects.

• Each project to be assigned a docteam member who will be responsible for its maintenance. Projects without such a person not to be considered.

  • Team should stay in regular contact with those "project owners" to monitor how things are going. Group leaders should post updates on the DocteamProjects page regularly as to the status of their project(s).

  • Administrators guides not to be worked on for this release
• The question of who is to take charge of which document was not determined at the meeting, to be followed up on mailing list. The following people volunteered:
  • KDE docs - Jerome, Troy, Greg
  • Gnome docs - Jon, Matt (mdke)
  • Dennis, Corey, Troy, Greg agreed to help out with Gnome docs where time permits.

• The install guide is not in the list of projects, this oversight should be corrected ASAP.

• List of orphaned projects to be posted on the wiki and to mailing list.

Other Projects

• Jeff (jdub) proposed that more can be done to harness the documentation coming from upstream in the source packages. He said the level of technical expertise necessary to do this would not be too high. Mark agreed, stating that it was important to exploit the low hanging fruit Jeff agreed to follow this up on the mailing list to set out his proposals. Although he will not be able to head up the project due to time constraints, he suggested that Henrik might be able to help.

• Matt (mpt) has been working on a spec for Help here. The technical questions regarding this project should be discussed in the future. Work on the spec to continue, but it is probably not possible to implement it by Breezy.

• [Off Agenda] Translation - some members of the French LoCoTeam expressed concern over the question of how documentation team stuff is translated. Matt (mdke) discussed this with them privately to clarify. More on l10n to follow on mailing list.

Docteam / Developer Community Relations

• The docteam is to liase more closely with the CommunityCouncil and the TechnicalBoard in order to bring the team more closely into the mainstream of the Ubuntu project. Mark said:

12:48   sabdfl there are a couple of principles i'd like to propose:
12:48   sabdfl  - volunteers should feel they have the freedom to pursue whatever technical and substantial interests they have
12:49   sabdfl  if we can accomodate those with core infrastructure, we will, if not, we'll orgnaise Linode virtual servers so guys can get root somewhere and play to their hearts content
12:49   sabdfl  that said, we should have regular meetings, so we at least have a mutual idea of what our current interests are
12:49   sabdfl  from the CC side, we can lay out a roadmap of the project, and what issues will likely be important at different times

• In terms of disputes and roadmaps, the CommunityCouncil can help, in terms of technical issues regarding docteam tools, the TechnicalBoard can help. When a dispute arises between the docteam and development, rather than having a frustrating "yes/no" argument, the proposal should be brought to the appropriate board. This communication will ensure that a breakdown in relations is avoided in future.

  • Mark asked that the docteam have a member present at the CC and TB meetings from now on.
  • Doc team to become a formal project team. This requires:
    • Regular meetings, summaries to go to -news / -traffic.
    • Jerome volunteered to organise this, Mark suggested that he is happy to provide funding for a secretarial position.
• [Off Agenda] Mark suggested that the docteam look into using Baz as a possible replacement for svn on a long term basis. The team agreed to do this, although not for this release.

New Member Access Rights

• The current method used by the team to get a new member is that after some patches have been posted by the relevant person, this is drawn to Enrico's attention, who then requests from Elmo that an account be opened. Now that Enrico has finished as the Docteam secretary, whether this arrangement can continue should be investigated. Enrico should be asked if he is prepared to continue this role.
• An alternative to this is for the svn repository to be transferred to a linode server and administered by the team. Matt (mdke) said that he does not see a problem with the current system, going via Elmo. Several members liked the idea of a separate server.

StyleGuide

• We did not have time to deal with this agenda issue, it should be dealt with ASAP on the mailing list or at the next docteam meeting.

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CategoryDocteam