Meetings

Revision 66 as of 2010-08-09 01:52:11

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Note: If #ubuntu-meeting is full, or down, or not working for some reason then our backup channel is #ubuntu-manual.

Next Meeting, Monday 9th August 2010 at 1500 UTC

The meeting (as announced here) will take place in #ubuntu-manual. It is very important for all the core team members to attend.

Agenda

  • 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
  • Website
    • Website Content
    • Bug Form
    • Forum or not ?
  • Practicality Scheduled Meetings

Please add to the agenda if you have any ideas!

Summaries, from older to newer

Project Meeting 02/01/2010

Full log can be found here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/01/02/%23ubuntu-meeting.html

Summary of important topics:

The new plain text method

Decided against using plain text. jmburgess suggested using LaTeX, other alternatives were also suggested. After some explanation of LaTeX and benefits, a vote was held on switching to LaTeX.

The vote was passed 10 in favour to 0 against.

Sourcing Images

Decided against using custom artwork for now. Need a list of screenshots that we want, which humphreybc is going to start compiling on the wiki. Decided that screenshots are very important, and that we cannot sacrifice any screenshots due to the translation of them being difficult.

Licensing of the manual

We looked into the licensing, decided that some variant of Creative Commons (CC) was most appropriate, but need to contact someone from the ubuntu-docs team to confirm which variant.

Approver for main release blueprints

This is going to be changed to the Ubuntu Manual Team instead of Benjamin Humphrey.

Overall Goals

Revised the overall goals (chapter two of the wiki) and decided they were satisfactory.

Kelvin Gardiner's feedback

See Kelvins feedback here: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/350369/

We decided to explicitly split the manual into two parts, voted 7 for, 0 against. The first half will be aimed at complete newbies, the second half is for more advanced users.

Changes to the chapter order were also agreed upon, and chapter 8 and 10 will be merged together. Chapter order still needs to be refined, but this can be done over time.

Chapter 9: Useful Applications

Decided to remove Ubuntu Tweak because it's not in the repositories, and added Pitivi, Wine and the GIMP to the list.

Questions and Feedback

AnmolSarma asked about games - we decided to include a small paragraph near the end of the first half of the manual that lets users know there are a lot of games available in the repositories - and perhaps having an "Authors Picks" Top 5 list of good games or similar.

Also decided a short summary on Wine should be in Chapter 9.

Date and Time for next meeting

We decided that 1100 UTC on a Saturday suited most people, although Sunday might be better. For now, we decided to hold weekly optional briefs at this time, and then have full meetings when we deem it necessary. See the meetings chapter on this wiki for more detail.

Project Brief 09/01/2010

Full log can be found at http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/01/09/%23ubuntu-manual.html. In this meeting we discussed the rewrite of the the Table of Contents. The result of of which can be seen at bug #504668.

The main reasoning behind changing everything was to keep in line with the fact that we are aimed toward absolute beginner, who really don't want to touch the terminal. We have decided that the new ToC has a better flow as well as a better content spread.

The entire conversation is up on the bug comments.

Project Brief 16/01/2010

Saturday, 16th January 2010 at 1100 UTC/GMT in #ubuntu-manual on irc.freenode.net

Agenda

  • Roll Call
  • Welcome to our new members
  • Changes since last meeting (new editing team, ToC, LaTeX stuff etc)
  • Style and content of margin notes
  • Style and content of in-line definition notes
  • Making the project more self-documenting
  • Format of the credits
  • Style of the footer - and header?
  • Font colours review
  • Indentation review
  • Page type - A4, US Letter, or both?
  • Screenshot and image resolutions and guide - captions? Figures?
  • Glossary format and assignee
  • Index and assignee
  • Chapter heading review
  • Title page proposals
  • Feedback from Ubuntu Forums questionnaire
  • Are we still on track?
  • Questions/Feedback

Meeting Summary

Meeting started at 1105 UTC.

Log: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/01/17/%23ubuntu-meeting.html


The meeting had around 10 active participants to being with. Most of the meeting was discussing style and formatting of various parts of LaTeX. There was quite a bit of voting, here are the results:

Vote: "Should margin notes be exclusively used for cross references?" Result: 6 for, 2 against.

Vote: Warnings and IMPORTANT things are in the paragraph, with formatting to highlight the importance. Cross references and background info are in the margins. Remove in-line notes altogether. Final result is 10 for, 0 against. 0 abstained. Total: 10

Vote: Should the notes have colour? Final result is 0 for, 6 against. 0 abstained. Total: -6

Vote: Should the margin notes be on the right? Final result is 8 for, 0 against. 0 abstained. Total: 8

Warning Icon VOTE: Warnings should be in a paragraph, with an icon like the one above, that sits in the left margin, indented. Final result is 8 for, 0 against. 0 abstained. Total: 8

Self documenting: Decided to leave it as is, improve readme in the branch. Point to wiki for more info.

Credits: Three columns, no bullet points. Smaller font.

Footer: Number + chapter title on left, page number on right.

Vote: Font colours stay the same. Final result is 5 for, 0 against. 1 abstained. Total: 5

Decided we are on track. No further questions/feedback. Next meeting Saturday 30th January 2000 UTC.


Meeting ended at 1230 UTC.

Meeting 30/01/10

30th January 2010 at 2000 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net

Summary

  • We decided (vote: 9 for, 0 against) to create a new section in the prologue called "Conventions used in this publication" which should act as a sort of "key" to icons etc for the rest of the manual
  • Target audience wasn't completely decided on, but lots of conversation took place about it. For a rough idea of Ubuntu users' average age, we found this thread.

  • Some words thrown around for the writing style: Not witty, but welcoming, clear, concise, FOSS = awesome, solid, trustworthy, capable, friendly yet professional
  • Title was undecided with two proposals receiving a count of 3 each, "The Ubuntu Manual" and "Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04" - Decided to defer discussion to the mailing list for now.
  • Screenshots, points of action from now on:
    • Appoint a screenshot leader and a team
    • Create a new branch off the main trunk branch for screenshots
    • Be very, very, very selective when choosing screenshots

    • Use a consistent virtual machine image
    • PNG as the input format, JPG as output format possibly
    • 800x600 8 bit images
    • Screenshot taking will start on March 4th, the Lucid UI freeze
    • Possibly use placeholder images in the meantime, Kevin Godby (godbyk) was assigned to look into this
  • Alpha review: We're behind schedule, everyone needs to keep their "progress" up to date on their assigned blueprints. Need to make more progress on writing, only 10 days till alpha release.
  • Decided to freeze the writing at our Beta, March 18th. This should allow us some more time to fine tune the writing, do some major editing and then it should also give over a month for translations to catch up before Release Candidate.
  • Very latest manual PDF build can be found here.

Agenda

  • Target audience
  • How/where/when will users come across our document?
  • What style/tone should we aim for, what should be the message both about our document and Ubuntu?
  • What should the title be?
    • (The) Ubuntu (10.04) Manual
    • The Ubuntu Manual for 10.04
    • Ubuntu (10.04) Quick Start Guide
    • Ubuntu (10.04): A Beginners Guide
    • A Beginners Guide to Ubuntu (10.04)
    • An Introduction to Ubuntu (10.04)
    • The Ubuntu Manual: A Beginners Guide for New Users (10.04) (suggested by Kelvin Gardiner)
    • Other suggestions
  • Handling screenshots (UI freeze March 4th)

  • Change to beta release date to align with the Lucid beta
  • This

  • We need to decide on a date for the writing freeze
  • Ilya Haykinson would like everyone who is writing a chapter to create a summary of their chapter on the wiki
  • Alpha review

Recommended reading:

Project meeting 13/02/2010

Full logs here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/02/13/%23ubuntu-manual.html

Agenda

  • 48 Hours of Ubuntu Manual Learning
  • BETA Release milestones
  • Ubuntu Manual Global Jam
  • Artwork icons
  • T-t-title page!

Summary

  • Discussed timetabling of 48 hours of Ubuntu Manual - see http://etherpad.com/ov6YwNDcDi for timetabling & edit if you need

  • Decided to create \screenshotTODO{description} command to insert placeholder and produce list of required screenshots
  • Discussion of Global Jam. Decided that it would be beneficial to promote translations and screenshots to be taken. Anybody near one was encouraged to go
  • Design team to produce mockups for chapter header icons
  • Title page not discussed without humphreybc and others
  • Use of serial commas throughout agreed
  • Kevin Godby to set up glossary system
  • Kevin Godby and Josh Holland to investigate creating daily localised builds

Quickshot meeting 18/04/2010

Full logs here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/04/18/%23ubuntu-meeting.html

Agenda

  • Client
  • Server
  • Bug fixes
  • Road map
  • Any other business
  • Next meeting?

Summary

  • When quickshot loads it checks for local files then one server for the config file downloads the one the user. chooses and then does everything else on the project related server.
  • Luke to draw up some concept ideas for the gui design to be mailed to the mailing list.
  • Test out/look into the idea of error checking the screenshots.
  • Online help found through the help menu.
  • We are going to use quickshot.ubuntu-manual.org .
  • For the server we need to figure out what behaviors we're trying to prevent (specifically), and that will help us determine how to do it.
  • Neil to mail the list on what standard docstring format to use.
  • The next meeting will be when we decide we need one.

Project meeting 12/06/2010

The next meeting will be on Saturday the 12 June 2010 at 2000 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net

Agenda

  • Ubuntu Manual Project philosophy
  • Ubuntu support and learning center
  • Ilya talking about research
  • Cleaning up the instructions on the website
  • Translation releases
  • Lucid 2nd edition - what we should target
  • Goals for Maverick

Logs

Meeting logs can be found at: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/06/12/%23ubuntu-manual.html