Redevelopment of Quickshot for its 1.0.0 release should be a much lighter task, considering everything we've done and learned, especially with six months to apply polish at our convenience, so I should be able to volunteer to help enforce style consistency, edit content, and add supplementary writing to the next version.
-Neil Tallim On 1 April 2010 01:24, Ilya Haykinson <[email protected]> wrote: > All, > Now that we've hit the writing freeze, we need to consider what the next > steps are for the English language edition. > Clearly, we've accomplished a great deal with the first edition. In a few > months we've gone from almost no content to having a complete manual of 170 > pages. I think this is quite an accomplishment for the team, and I would > like to thank and congratulate everyone who's contributed with writing, > editing, technical help, programming, artwork, testing, editing, research, > outreach etc. I think we also owe it to our translation teams, who've been > making progress even as the manual has been undergoing great changes -- and > who have a lot of work in front of them still. > Our manual is of course not perfect, but that was never the goal for the > first edition. If I had to look in retrospect at our mission for this first > edition, it would be "Get Something Out". Yes, we want completeness; yes, we > want high quality. But above everything, we needed to get a decent product > _released_, and I think that this is the overriding theme of the last > several months of work. > I propose that at this point, we start following on three different tracks. > The first track is about finishing the First Edition. There is still work in > getting it translated (indeed, now is the translators' time to shine), > released, promoted, etc -- not to mention any final fixes. > The second track should be releasing a Second Edition for Ubuntu 10.04. If > the first edition's goal was "get something out", I think that the second > edition could have a mission statement of "Raise the Quality Bar". We know > that our manual is not completely perfect -- there are lots of (important) > omissions; there are probably bugs; there are inconsistencies in style, > grammar, voice, etc. For Second Edition, we would work to fix all of these. > We would also not step with just reviewing the work ourselves, but engage > outside resources to help us: we can put an emphasis on testing, and on > processing feedback from the initial release. I would imagine that we could > probably set a goal of an early June release, and deliver a > consistently-written, thoroughly-tested edition for 10.04. Our goal would > not be to add much additional content, but rather to make the current > content consistently great. > The third track should be preparing for a First Edition for Ubuntu 10.10. > While the release cycle for the OS itself will probably kick into high gear > soon after Lucid's release, the following version will not really take shape > for a few months after April 29th. After our own 10.04 Second Edition is > finalized, we can start focusing on things that _we_ want to accomplish for > 10.10. I think that the mission for that edition could be "Improve breadth > of coverage". There are some parts that we are missing -- troubleshooting > wireless connections or audio issues, OpenOffice, minor utilities, > additional command line commands, additional hardware. This will be the time > to dive into portions of Ubuntu that the 10.04 versions did not cover, and > make the manual a more comprehensive guide for new users. > In general, I would love for us to take the "get it out" approach of the > current edition and try to transform it into a "make it great" approach for > the second edition, and then further convert it into a "cover more" > approach. If we can accomplish all three goals over time, I think that we > will ensure that our team can ship high quality products, repeatedly. > I'd love to hear comments from everyone on this approach. Please don't > hesitate to reply to the list. > -ilya haykinson > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > > _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
