[maemo-developers] Maemo documentation - feedback time is now

[From: Quim Gil]

Hi Ian,

The Documentation Big Plans will take effectively place as soon as we
hire the (hopefully) brilliant documentation manager we are (still)
looking for. In the meatime the broad plans are:

1. Make a clear distinction between official and not-official docs in
the new maemo site.

2. Structure properly the official documentation so it's easy to see
what is there and what is still lacking.

3. Introduce more and better quality checks in order to keep the
official documentation in a good and better shape. Keep the call for
documentation needs open and be fast responding to your needs.

Although the first focus is on the official documentation, we have high
expectations in the community documentation work. The idea is to help
providing:

a) A basic content structure to ease the publishing and retrieval of
docs.

b) Tools to differentiate "good" docs from the rest. As you know 'good'
is a quite subjective value, these tools should put this subjectivity
into efficient work.

c) Proper links between official and community documentation, making
possible to move/listing of docs from one category to another.


In the meantime we will work in two parallel areas: 

1. Nice & useful packaging of documentation in i.e. PDF sets with decent
look&feel, consistent style, professional proofreading.

2. Orientation of documentation towards training for entry and mid
levels.


And just to make this explicit, "documentation" should include graphics,
screenshots and even screencasts and videos wherever useful.

One additional challenge will be to make all this with a certain/proper
coordination with upstream projects, since it is obvious that a lot of
maemo depends on components originated out of maemo.


These are more or less the pre-plans. Seriously. They are open to
improvement. In fact we expect this new doc manager to push these plans
to a level we can't hardly imagine now.  :)


On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 16:42 -0500, ext Ian wrote:
> Ola, My question is about the wiki and the idea that was discussed to
>  use as staging area for experimental documentation. Like this docs
>  which are not well tested for spelling errors/bugs/version
>  incompatibilties and so on do not make it up into the official docs
>  until they *are* well tested. []'s Ian
> 
-- 
Quim Gil - http://maemo.org