[maemo-community] The role of the docmaster

[From: Qole]

Thank you for this, Quim.

I personally wish there was some way to pull the many, many great tips and tricks out of Talk, like a prospector hunting for gold, and collect them somewhere central. Too much for one person, but a good organizer / delegator could send out teams to rove through the threads and return with the nuggets...

For instance, there are great tips for setting up an ssh socks5 proxy, trying out the Fremantle interface on your N810, using a bluetooth mouse on your tablet, encoding DVDs for best playback, printing from the tablet, connecting to passworded Windows shares, streaming video from the tablet with VLC, etc, etc... 

There are just so many, many, um, not-so-useful posts to sift through... 

----- Original message -----
Hi, does actually the docmaster have a clear assignment?

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team

Until now Dave has been involved in multiple and diverse tasks, but less
and less ties to documentation work.

Yet documentation is far from ideal in the Maemo project. Good
documentation for develope and contributors is an essential part of the
maturity and success of a project. Although there are many excellent
undocumented projects that defy this principle, the Maemo project
decided that it was idea to fund a community docmaster.

But... what does this mean in practice? Some ideas to consider:

- There are many bugs about the official documentation. The stable and
the unstable. What bugs are more important? What are more urgent? The
docmaster can chase Maemo SW on the things that need a fix before the rest.

- Are the official docs delivered what the community needs? Maybe there
is something important missing. Maybe there are some areas that should
be documented further. The docmaster could influence the planning for
future documentation work.

- What about the frequent questions from users and developers. Are they
being followed to detect what needs more/better documentation, or just a
prominent place somewhere so people can find it?

- Actually the docmaster could even give a try to the documentation
before is being released, preventing some of the bugs to even show up.

- And the documentation tools. We have discussed about using the wiki
for developer documentation, about publishing the APIs nicely à la
library.gnome.org... what is the status of these projects? Is the doc
master not only following them but active there?

- Specifically, 1 of the 6 2010 objectives (don't you think they are
forgotten) is about community documentation:
http://wiki.maemo.org/2010_Agenda#Co-production_of_official_.26_community_documentation

Then there are problems of documentation in the community projects e.g.

- Plenty of tips and tricks lost in talk.maemo.org. Who will recover them?

- Actually there was the debate of the old ITt wiki and the diff with
still with the tmo wiki. The docmaster should drive the discussion there
and put time to fix what needs more urgent fixing.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=26503

- Is our wiki well organized? Provides a nice entry for the people using
it? I don't even know since I find the 4 things I use frequently, but
what about others?

- Also in Downloads there are many popular projects that are missing
screenshots or a good description. The doc master could contact the
remarkable projects and ask them to be a bit more careful about their
releases.

... and I could go on since I don't code neither I design, but almost
everybody can type a letter or two.  ;)

I'm not saying that Dave should all this all the time, but I think the
docmaster should have the initiative to see what is most needed first
and go for it. Some tasks are continuous and need to be made as part of
as routine. Some others need a frontal attack until completed.

What will be the Must, Should and Could tasks of the docmaster in the
following sprint?

--
Quim Gil
open source advocate
Maemo Software @ Nokia

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