So... despite evidence to the contrary, I actually did survive the trip
to Orvieto :-P
The conference was well organized this year. The Italian community did
an excellent job of arranging facilities, video streaming the sessions,
etc etc. Attendance was good, but I'm guessing not as many as in
Beijing. All the familiar faces were there :-)
The first day was a flurry of conference sessions and loads of people
cornering me in various buildings to talk about the Doc Project - both
concerns and ideas, much of which I attempted to roll into what I talked
about during the doc presentation.
The second day was much the same, attending conference sessions and
meeting with various people in the halls. The third day was a lot quieter.
The Doc presentation (on the second day) was reasonably well attended,
and was much more of a lively open discussion than a one way
presentation (as so many other presentations were).
You can watch the video... but these are some key points we discussed
that stood out to me:
- Much of the discussion was centered around issues that have been
around for a long time, and are well known to the Doc Project.
- Wiki tools that we have available are not known, and people don't
know who to ask for new ones to be added in.
- Some requested Wiki functionality is challenging to implement because
of how the current Wiki is set up.
- Wiki is lacking Doc creation tools that make creating docs more
manageable (eg change control)
- There is a general consensus that the doc process is a problem
(confusing) for new contributors. New people don't know where to start,
or who to ask, and info is not clear and easy to find. The Wiki Help
pages (I mean the MediaWiki help itself, not OOo Help in the Wiki) for
example are not implemented correctly (or at all in some cases).
- There are various entry points for the Doc Project,and none are
consistent in approach or appearance which contributes to the confusion
of new people.
- The lack of coherence and lack of clear info means that we are
loosing new contributors... they give up, loose interest etc.
- Wiki translations are disconnected from the source language. As soon
as there is a translation, the original and translation follow different
paths, and we are not keeping them in sync. The only method of
synchronization is accidental discovery, and then complex doc
comparisons to find the parts that have changed, and then re-translating.
- Question whether the User Guides on the Wiki (in Wiki syntax) is a
good idea. Is it actually serving the community well by having them
there? Would it be better to simply provide PDF and ODT links in the
Wiki and limit the Wiki content to HowTos and smaller info chunks?
- Edits to the Wiki User guides are not always captured back into the
OOoAuthors doc process.
- Question about the possibility of a new independent OOo Doc Wiki that
can be set up with full namespaces and allow full change control etc
(Flagged Ravs on all pages).
- Community Council stated that if we need money for a developer bounty
to redesign the Application Help Viewer, we need to write the proposal
soon. Funding is available for projects, and a better/improved
Application Help Viewer is something that would be worth proposing to
the CC.
- There is a general agreement that OOoAuthors and OOoDocProject should
be one and the same group, not two independent groups with their own
agendas. I think we are making good progress here, and everyone I
talked to seemed to agree (or at least mostly agree).
A Wiki Mindstorm page has been set up (and announced on the mailing
list). The goal of this Wiki page is just to have a common place to
record ideas for the overall Doc Project.
I talked to a lot of people who had loads of questions - almost all came
down to a need for increased communication between everyone in the Doc
Project (and the other Projects that we touch such as L10N).
I've probably missed something in this long email... if I remember
something else, I'll forward it along. As I said, these are the
discussion points that stood out to me.. points that were raised either
in the Doc session, or in hallway conversations.
C.
--
Clayton Cornell ccorn...@openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
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