[documentation-dev] The Big Documentation Project Year End Review and Lookout (HTML)

[Frank Peters]

Dear project members, 2007 is almost at its end and many of you will be looking forward to spending the holidays with their families, or otherwise take a break and rest.  This is traditionally the time to look back to the past year and see what's in front of us, and I will not stand back from this tradition. 2007 brought some changes to our project, the saddest of which was that Gerry Singleton passed away unexpectedly in May. He lead the project and used to be one of the supporting pillars of the project for many years. Certainly long before I joined the project. He will be sorely missed. During the year we have also seen some changes to the structure of the project and how we work on and present documentation. We shifted our focus from the web to the wiki allowing more and more of you to easily get engaged and work on documentation pieces. Since we started putting things up there, the wiki gained more and more interest, starting off at around 200 page views in May to an incredible 72,000 page views in November! But the Documentation web page remains to be popular with average monthly page views of 200,000. This surely proves the importance of the Documentation project. The reorganization has just yet begun and we're still cleaning up the web attics to put more and more on the wiki. Jean started to consolidate the several FAQ lists that were out there and we now have them all in one place, ready for all of you to add, edit, and extend!  The very productive folks OOoAuthors moved their guides to the wiki as well, so we are getting close to having one access point for the users. Sun - and I won't try to hide that this is my employer who generously allows me to spend time on this exciting and wonderful project - has open sourced all of its StarOffice documentation which is now available under open source license in the wiki. The Administration and BASIC Guide are out there. The Developer's Guide will follow early next year after the update to a new Mediawiki version is completed. The new OpenOffice.org User Forum opened its portal in November and the  speed at which they grew a forum community is just unbelievable. They already have more than 1,400 members and accumulated more than 3,800 postings on nearly 1,000 topics. I am deeply impressed and I am looking forward to collaborating with these fine folks in the future to our mutual benefit. I could rattle on for a while because so many more things have happened. Instead let me just thank all of you for your interest in the Documentation project, for  the small or large things that you contributed to make this project grow.  Just a short and highly subjective collection of highlights: Jean, thanks so much for your cooperation, we're so sorry to hear you "resign". Mariano and Drew, how is the tutorial doing :-) David,  thanks for your tutorial contributions, how is the mag doing? Andreas, Sophie, Jacqueline, all you wanderers between the languages. Thanks for your contributions and your amazing level of commitment! And here are the top 5 wiki editors for 2007 (drum roll): Ccornell Drking Fpe Kirk Jeanweber Thanks to  you and keep going! See if YOU can make it to the top 5 reasonable edits, please  ;-) I also want to apologize for the occasional lack of response and the many, many, many, many gaps that still need to be filled to make contribution easier. Bear with me, or yet better: help me fill these gaps! There are some quite challenging endeavors on the list for 2008 and the project can need any help it can get. Here are some highlights for 2008: move to a new Mediawiki version (1.11) in January that will allow us to use some new neat features allowing to make the wiki pages yet more appealing finally publish the Developer's Guide (depends on the wiki update). There is lots of room for your participation! continue to consolidate the FAQs, and the Howtos work on a publication framework allowing to export ODF and PDF from aggregated wiki content put the maintenance workspace of the application help to the wiki work with the Native Language Confederation to find a common way of presenting multi-lingual documentation on the wiki as well as allow for cross-language sharing of documentation content find a collaboration practice with the OOo forum to pull documentation content to the wiki ...and probably much much more. As you can see, Documentation is all but dull!  8-) But enough said. We are a global and multicultural group of people, so regardless whether you will be celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, or Eid ul-Adha, whether you are having winter or summer time, whatever contintent you live on, I would like to wish all of you a very happy, relaxing, fruitful, and most of all peaceful holiday and a good start in a new year 2008. It will be ours! :-) Thanks Frank -- Frank Peters Documentation Project Co-Lead The OOo Documentation Project: SIGN UP - PARTICIPATE - CONTRIBUTE IT'S FREE! NO OBLIGATIONS! http://documentation.openoffice.org http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation