Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs

Tue Nov 12 01:22:07 UTC 2013

 Hi Pete
Your blog below was quite appropriate.  I work in aerospace and do a fair amount
of writing and software development.  The editing department here is also a translation
department as the company is a global one, dealing with Chinese, Indian dialects, French, Spanish,
and a slew of UN national languages.  The translators want paragraphs of text. The English editor wants
text delivered double spaced 12 size font, with revision management enabled and comments enabled.  
The company uses MS word, but Libreoffice, (for Fedora's purpose), would suffice.

By allowing authors to use Libreoffice, along with Libreoffice's revision management, I believe that a quality
product and a more easily and accurately translated source would be generated.

Regarding installations, and expositories,  there are varying levels of expertise as Fedora users. Many users,
from my use of  forums is that they are more frequented by are beginners. They want a working Fedora distribution, 
so that they may use the tools that are included. (from workbenches, to business software).  I would say that the 
more experienced individuals do not frequent the forums too often, as "they know it all, and what can they learn?"

Your ideas are great, I fully agree with them, but "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
My view is that the tool you are using, with po files, is great for application code messages. It misses something when
used as the documentation preparation tool.

Can you please try this experiment. Are you able to ask an author to write his stuff with Libreoffice, and then turn on revision managment to  send out his work for comments and feedback. Lets see how that works. I would even take a page or two of text, if it is handed to me that way.

Libreoffice is not a barrier, since is is ubiquitous. 
Regards

Leslie 

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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>
>
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