kde-quality update (was: kde-quality @ LinuxTag .. spread the word!)

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 14:05:17 +0200, "Fabrice Mous"
<fabricemous at xs4all.nl> said:
> Hi all, 
> 
> During LinuxTag I did a talk about the KDE-quality project. I meant to
> give a 
> 30 min talk. I was a bit nervous and started speeding up my presentation 
> (without noticing it myself) and I managed to do it in 15 min. The
> attendance 
> of people was very small. I had at maximum maybe 10 people listening to
> my 
> talk. 
> 
> Maybe this particular talk wasn't a big succes for this project but I did
> talk 
> about it and plan to talk about it some more on future events (hey I got
> the 
> slideshow already). This project is really a good way to help people get 
> involved with KDE and we need to spread the word. 
> 
> As for my participance in kde-quality I would like to volunteer for the 
> "Communication And Promotion" section. As I am an editor for dot.kde.org
> I 
> have quite some leads for good articles. We just lack the people for it.
> So 
> anyone interested can shout out on this list and I will pick it up. 
> 

This is great, Fabrice, thank you, and welcome on board.

For KDE quality, we have two main events ahead: the bug hunting season
and the new release season.

The bug hunting season deserves a call to arms, inviting people to check
if old bugs are still valid, and do do general bug management. I will
have a look in the bug management guide to see if we can update before
we start calling people to help out. It would be nice to announce that
together with the beta...

The new release season involves checking the modules for the status of
the doc, whatsthis, artwork, bug work, etc... and update the wiki pages
for these modules, just like we did in the beginning of the 3.2 release
cycle. At least with kdepim, this experience has been very constructive,
especially in the docs and artwork section. If we can find more
volunteers, we can expand this experience. I think we can try to update
the wiki pages and then announce it widely. On the 3.2 we did the other
way around (first announce, than create the pages). By creating the
pages first, we can give a focus to newcomers. The kde-quality
announcement attracted a lot of people, but most of them did not find a
task they wanted to perform.

On a side note, I would like to talk about the experience of eating my
own dog-food by helping out KPilot, following the holistic approach
(looking to the application as a whole).

I have been working on bug hunting, documentation, whatsthis, some
usability, and even artwork. I plan to write an article about "cool
things to do with KPilot" when KDE 3.3 is out. The feedback from the
maintainers and coders has been great. It is amazing how much they
listen to you after you start sending some documentation patches :) It
has been a very fun ride so far, and I invite you to select an
application you like and start helping out right now.

For people who never wrote documentation before, learning the docbook
format is a bit time consuming. Using quanta as the docbook editor helps
a lot. I plan to create a docbook toolbar for quanta to make things even
easier, and to update the documentation section of the kde quality
howto.

I would appreciate if someone could help me out to increase the mention
of
kde-quality in the kde.org site, especially http://www.kde.org/support.

The guides we have available in the quality site and the wiki are
excellent. We need more links to them. I plan to maintain and update
them for the foreseeable future.

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz
-- 
  Carlos Leonhard Woelz
  carloswoelz at imap-mail.com