Le 2013-02-09 17:00, Robinson Tryon a écrit :
When I first went to the odfauthors.org site, I thought that it was a
site for end-users because of the highly-prominent links to books for
sale, but now I believe that the website is largely focused on
internal production. Perhaps there's something we can do to make
things more clear to regular users as well as to our volunteer
community.
ODFAuthors have been partners with OOo and in particular with
LibreOffice from the very start. Jean Hollis Weber of ODFAuthors is one
of our most prolific contributors on the project, we also make use of
ODFAuthor resources and goodwill. I believe it is we who should be
thankful for ODFAuthors helping us out with the docs teams and
resources. I doubt things would go as smoothly without Jean and her team
at ODFAuthors who work at quite high professional standards.
I am sorry if the "Get Help" FAQ move caused this headache. Let me know if
there has been a loss of some important information and I will make
arrangements to post it back onto the Ask.LibreOffice.org site for future
reference.
Thanks. Is all of the content on that site available under a license
compatible with that of the Ask site? (CC-BY-SA 3.0) If so, I can just
copy-in anything I need from the cached copy up on Archive.org.
As far as I can remember, all that same information is already up on the
Ask site. You just have to find it. No need to go to Archive.org.
IMO, most questions users ask on the Ask.LibreOffice.org site are probably
best answered there, and, IMO, I don't see a reason to work on any
user-related FAQ when the Ask.LibreOffice.org site is probably the best type
of solution for a good living/breathing FAQ site.
Using the Ask site as the general FAQ as we go forward sounds like a
solid plan to me. The FAQ on the wiki currently has some overlap with
the Ask site: > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq
What do you guys think about migrating questions from that FAQ to the
Ask site? I'd be happy to shepherd that work, if that's amenable to
you.
I don't think this would be an acceptable option as the FAQ is, again,
used in large part for contributor work. IMO, there is nothing wrong
with overlapping/doubling or information as people tend to operate in
different ways; some like to get information from FAQ's, others from Ask
sites, others from mailing lists, others from forums ... IMO, it is up
to the site maintainers to triage the information appropriately so that
it is factual (as best as one can get) for their own particular user
base. To me, it doesn't sound like a good idea to remove a contributor
tool for users when we are in need of contributors.
My question to you now is this; have the mods/admins discussed eliminating
duplicated questions on the Ask.LibreOffice.org site in order to make it
more effective?
We've had some discussion, but we certainly need to have more! :-)
On the Ask site mods have the ability to close questions as
duplicates, and now that we've got a few more active mods, we're
working on cleaning-up a large backlog of out-of-date and "abandoned"
questions. Out of 3000 questions, about 1,500 are still open (i.e.
they haven't been closed or resolved with a good answer).
One of the best ways for us to improve the quality of the Ask site and
to make it more effective is to improve the quality of the question
titles. A title of "Form Scrambled" or "soffice.bin" is much less
helpful than "Base: How can I make the fields on my contact management
form save their position?" or "Why is Comodo antivirus giving me a
CloudScanner.Trojan.Gen@2@1 alert for soffice.bin when I try to open
LO 4.0.0.3?". For now, only mods and very-high-karma users can make
these changes, so it'll take a little while to work through the site.
I've been talking with Joel Madero and Joren De Cuyper (QA) about ways
that we can improve communication between different groups of people.
It's great to be able to ask the QA folks what they think should end
up in the bugtracker and what they think should stay as a question on
the Ask site, or coordinate on some other aspect of the project. I'd
love to see similar collaboration/easy communication with other groups
like the Documentation Team. A few ideas off the top of my head
- When answering a Q, there should be a clear/easy way to ask the Doc
Team where to find the latest documentation on a particular topic
- If "How do I do X?" comes up and we don't have (can't find?) good
docs on it, there should be an easy way to ping the Doc team about the
need [File as an enhancement bug?]
- The text of really good Answers should be fed back to the Doc team
for inclusion in the next iteration of the documentation [Not sure if
this should be a pull or a push action]
This sounds more like a business model/plan where the people who work on
the project are considered employees and not volunteers. While this
sounds like an ideal plan, I would venture to guess that an
organizational scheme of this magnitude would not work. This would set
up too many regulations rather than opportunities to contribute. We are
built on a meritocratic philosophy which is why we have seen so much
growth in our dev section -- this is what is so attractive to our
contributors. Unfortunately, our other contributor branches have not
been able to keep up to the pace. It is all up to us to trumpet the
values of our project and try to attract contributor in our branches.
IMO, the quickest fix for the problem at hand is still the
rationalization of the Ask site, culling the question/answers that are
on the database at the present time ... I know it is a big job ... but
regardless of any fix, you will still have to do this. It also sounds
like the Ask site should try to involve more contributors on their site
to help with responses to user questions, have you tried to grow your
contributor base by inviting regular competent participants to join your
ranks?
IMO, the fact that there are different contributor FAQ's are fine, the
user FAQ is supposed to the the Ask site. And yes, unfortunately, there
may be some overlapping, but the quality of answers on the site still
remains the responsibility of the people behind the Ask site.
Note that I am not annoyed with your questions nor with your
suggestions. But, it looks to me that you are looking for answers to the
problems on the Ask site in the wrong places. Once the Ask site is
cleaned up, you may find that most of the problems will have lessened.
But, as we are following meritocratic philosophical values on the
project, there is nothing to stop you from organizing such a structure
as you describe, and, perhaps it may be adopted by the rest of us. Put
in writing on a wiki for people to read and if you find enough
contributors to run it, then we may all follow. It may work!
Again, thank you for the detailed answers. Please let me know about my
questions/suggestions, and if you have any further suggestions about
collaboration!
Cheers,
--Robinson 'qubit' Tryon
Cheers,
Marc
--
Marc Paré
[email protected]
http://www.parEntreprise.com
parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
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