[kde-doc-english] Doc team website

[Philip Rodrigues]

> Target Audiences we should consider
> ===================================
> 1: Potential Contributors who want to
> 2: Application developers who want to add/improve docs for their app
> 3: Existing team members, looking for reference information, or for further
> jobs to do
>
> 1 can be broken down to smaller groups, that overlap some, but may be
> looking for different information:
> 1a: People who have a good grasp of English and write well, but have never
> written documentation before
> 1b: People who have some experience with docbook
> 1c: People who have some experience with technical writing
>
> for instance, people in group 1a might need information about learning
> docbook, and how writing technical documentation differs from writing a
> simple web page howto. People in 1c might be ready to jump straight in.
> Providing the required information to 1a should not get in the way of 1c
> diving right into work.

I think this is in some ways the most important group, since we always need 
more people helping out, especially now that we have more "infrastructure" in 
place (a new userguide, a maintainer for the FAQ, work on a KDE-wide 
glossary, etc) which needs content.

So far, I'm not sure we're doing the best we could in attracting and retaining 
new contributors, and I think it's because, speaking for myself at least, 
we're quite ad hoc in the way we deal with potential contributors. Therefore, 
I'd say that the website has to be part of a whole strategy, which includes 
this list, the IRC channel, the groupware server, and so on.

The first suggestion I can make is that we should be more specific in 
suggesting particular tasks to new contributors. As Lauri says, not everyone 
has the personality, the motivation and the knowledge of the workings of KDE 
to be able to find something they'll enjoy working on without us pointing it 
out.

To be able to do this, we need to have a good list of "JJ"s, but I already 
mentioned that in my other message. I'll go through the bugs on b.k.o and 
mark some appropriate ones as JJs. I'll add those to the kolab todo as well.

I realise that this is getting perhaps a little off-topic, but does anyone 
else have suggestions about how we can help potential contributors to get 
over the first hurdle and get started? I'm thinking particularly about that 
crucial first reply to the "I'd like to help the docs team" email that we get 
on this list every so often.

Regards,
Philip

-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org
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