Hi Natalie, and welcome. Nice to have you here.
On 08/25/2010 01:10 PM, Nat Kononenko wrote:
I am a young ukrainian professional on the quest for acquiring new
experience and skills. It has been about two years since I've transferred to
Linux and delved into the open source world. One of the most appealing
sides of the system is it's extensive documentation. What is more, it is
often written with a sensible amount of humour! I'd like to make myself
useful to the community by participating in the document project of
OpenOffice. Though I am a newbie in techwriting, I could proofread, edit,
translate (Russian) and possibly write the chapters of the books in
working.
I'd like to have the author role please (uid: natkon) in order to have a go
at reviewing. Also, could you point me to the chapter that needs extra work
done?
I've given you Author rights on OOoAuthors.
The current tasks for the User guides can be found here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/User_Guides
Right now the whole documenting process seems to me a bit confusing, since
there is no practice of _assigning_ chapters to individual users. It seems
that some chapters get all the attention while others are left practically
untouched. In the outsourcing company that I used to work with, I've seen a
neat online solution for project management that helped to see exactly who
is doing parts of the assignment and the progresss of it. It looked as
something like this http://www.easyprojects.net/QuickTour/project_list.asp .
I don't know whether the _assigning_ part is applicable to the open projects
like what you're doing here, though.
Anyhow, you're doing a great job and I wish to be a part of it. :)
Yes, it is a bit confusing. We're in the process of trying to sort it
all out. Some of the team here are documenting the process of bringing
a new member up to speed. For those of us who've been here forever,
it's all familiar to us, but for the recent new members, it's unclear
what needs to be done and where. We're working on it. :-)
In the mean time, you can look over the list of User Guide tasks I
linked, or you can take a look at some of the other tasks that need to
be done... editing the FAQs and HowTos on the Wiki is one place I
suggest people get started with as they are small discrete tasks that
are easy to tackle.
This is part of an email I sent to the list a few days ago...
---------
The FAQs are here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ
If you look here, you will see several Wiki pages that are in the "Needs
help" Category.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Category:Documentation/NeedsRework
Working on an FAQ from there is not too difficult. You pick one, look
at it... research the answer... does it still apply to the latest OOo
release? IS it well formatted? Does it follow the style of the
"corrected" FAQs.
Look at this FAQ for example:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ/Writer/FormattingPagesAndDocuments/Where_is_the_gallery
It's easy to validate it... but it really needs to be rewritten into
something more accurate and more clear.
This FAQ for example has been checked and validated. It's technically
correct, and formatted nicely (consistent with the style used by other FAQs)
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ/Writer/FormattingPagesAndDocuments/How_do_I_perform_a_word_count_of_my_document%3F
The same thing applies to the HowTos.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Adding_More_Languages
needs to be validated. Last time it was formally checked was with OOo2.
It has not been confirmed with OOo3.
If you need guidance working on the WIki, let us know. The nice thing
about Wikis is... you can't break things permanently. If you make
changes that are not correct, or cause problems elsewhere, it's easy to
fix things up. Nothing is ever lost if you delete things.
There are tools for Wiki editing that you might find helpful with
getting started... for example the GUI editor. The instructions for
enabling it in your options are here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Help:FCKeditor
and you'll have a full WYSIWYG editor with handy buttons for most Wiki
edit functions. This isn't a perfect solution, but it covers the vast
majority of what you want to do.
-----------
If you get lost, please ask questions here on the mailing list.
Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we can pull together a clearer and
more comprehensive guide for the new team members.
C.
--
Clayton Cornell ccorn...@openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
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