Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs

[Chris A. Roberts]

Pete, 


Is there a way I can help contribute with the docs project again? Possibly something small to start with or I can work on the guide I was working on. 


- Chris Roberts 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Pete Travis" <me at petetravis.com> 
To: "For participants of the Documentation Project" <docs at lists.fedoraproject.org> 
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 6:51:06 PM 
Subject: Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs 

I took some time over the weekend to update my workstation to F20. It 
involved performing a lot of now routine tasks; installing the package 
set I use, pulling in the git repo I keep for $HOME, updating /etc/fstab 
to include network shares, adding a couple polkit rules for libvirt, 
blah blah. I'm sure we all have such a list. 

These are among many routine, everyday tasks for Fedora users. The kind 
of task that an experienced user could sit down and perform, and write 
up a how-to for the action on the fly while they do it. The kind of task 
that an inexperienced user would ask about on a forum, or on irc, or 
research with relatively specific search terms. I think of this as 
'incidental' or 'case-specific' documentation, rather than generalized 
documentation as provided in the guides. 

Our existing documentation base is *great*, and anyone who reads through 
it all will surely come out with the ability to fill in the gaps and 
handle case-specific problems. We're teaching techniques and tools, not 
execution. However, between the broad nature of the guides and the SEO 
reality of a publican site, I think we are failing to reach many users 
that are actively looking for tutorial-format content. 

Publican based guides have one major shortcoming. The barrier to entry 
for potential contributors is high. I had a chance at Flock to have 
some candid conversation over beer with a few folks outside of the loyal 
Docs team, and there was a general consensus that while they might be 
willing to write some *incidental* documentation - again, my term - 
contributing to a guide was an ordeal they didn't have time for. We've 
seen this repeatedly with new contributors as well, people who start out 
with enthusiasm that fades when there isn't work that they can easily 
drop into. Contributing to a guide is *not* a casual endeavor; it 
requires us to not only learn docbook and the subject matter, but to be 
entirely self-motivated while working on a project owned by someone 
else. Fitting into the workflow is just as intimidating as learning the 
tools, if not more. 

I would like to try something different. We should have a product that 
leverages the experience and quality of our seasoned contributors and 
enables new contributors to get started. We should have something that 
helps inexperienced, impatient users. We should enable the Fedora 
community at large to participate in our efforts, and I think that means 
coming to them as much as them coming to us. If we have something 
easier to contribute to, more contributors will likely follow, and then 
contributors and content for guides as well. 

I've set up a quick demonstration[1] of some software that I think will 
address these concerns, a python application called "Nikola"[2]. I have 
a package review in progress for it, and have already packaged some 
dependencies. Briefly, it takes plain text files with ReStructuredText 
or Markdown and transforms them into fully themed static websites. It 
hooks in to transifex nicely as well. Take a look, you'll find a post 
detailing how the implementation might work, and a post for the kind of 
content I envision putting there. 

[1] http://appliance.randomuser.org/solutions/ 
[2] http://www.getnikola.com/ 

-- 
-- Pete Travis 
- Fedora Docs Project Leader 
- 'randomuser' on freenode 
- immanetize at fedoraproject.org 



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