[kde-doc-english] KDE Janitors (QA?) Proposal

[Philip Rodrigues]

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Hi Carlos,
I'm on the KDE Documentation Team, and I thought you'd like some feedback 
about the "Janitors" proposal from the point of view of documentation 
writers.

Firstly, the good points, from a documentation point of view:

1. More coordination between different people working on the same application. 
Knowing what is happening with an application, when user-visible changes are 
being made, etc, without having to monitor kde-cvs, or thoroughly check 
applications regularly, would be helpful to documenters.

2. The app-based, rather than task-based, approach would (IMHO) be a more 
interesting way for new people to get involved.

On the other hand, there are a few issues with the proposal that need 
clarification, or discussion:

1. Are there enough people who have the necessary skills to perform tasks like 
this? You suggest programming, bug management, documentation, UI, artwork and 
communication as tasks which would be overseen by the Janitors. This is a 
very wide range of skills :-)

2. Would the aims of coordination between different teams be more easily 
achieved by formalising (slightly) the role of application maintainer? Or, to 
put the point in a slightly different way, would the Janitors just end up 
being the current application maintainers, since they already know the 
application? If this happens, (as seems likely?), then it will go against the 
idea of involving new people.

On a more positive note, I'd like to offer a suggestion. Since, as you point 
out, "the doer has most of the power," I suggest a pilot scheme to find out 
what will actually happen, rather than just speculating, as we have been 
doing so far. The pilot could take a handful of applications, of different 
sizes, in different modules, and find janitors for them. If the pilot ran 
from after the release of 3.2 until, say, the next minor release (3.2.1, I 
guess), then we would be able to see it in action over a reasonable "release 
cycle" in a short period of time.

Regards,
Phil
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