Documentation Team

The Meeting Minutes and the IRC log from our meeting this past Sunday have been posted.

We discussed which documents are being worked on for the 2.30 cycle, incorporating accessibility documentation in to user documentation, and planning GNOME Games documentation updates.

The GNOME Games planning is interesting in that with Mallard and our vision of topic based support is how user help should be built into games.  We brainstormed the following topics that should be in each games’ help file:

• Gameplay (Introduction)
• Basic Gameplay and winning scenario
• Strategy
• Multiple pages if necessary
• Multiplayer
• Tips and Tricks

Note the topics: “Strategy”, “Basic Gameplay”, “Multiplayer” and “Tips and Tricks”.  This is what topic based help is all about!  Rather than writing help focused on how to start a game and the basic controls, we aim to provide users with the winning conditions for the games and the strategies behind them.

Our next meeting will be November 29th.  See you there!

The GNOME Documentation Team will be having a meeting this Sunday, November 8th at 18:00 UTC in #docs on GIMPNet IRC.

This meeting is a working session focused on GNOME 2.30 planning, including a discussion of what documents are a priority for the 2.30 cycle and what topics are the focus of a new and re-written GNOME User Guide.  (Don’t call it a user guide!)

More information is available on the Docs team wiki.

See you there!

The meeting minutes from the Docs team meeting on October 4th have been published.

Our next meeting is Sunday, October 18th at 17:00 UTC.  We are proposing to meet bi-weekly to work on GNOME 3.0 documentation, including the user guide, accessibility guide and porting other GNOME apps to Mallard.

In other news, ProjectMallard.org is now live and over time will become a repository for information on using the Mallard language.  Mallard is more than just a XML language for GNOME, it is our hope that other projects, desktop environments and more use Mallard.

The GNOME Documentation Project has 2 upcoming meetings this week:

• Thursday, August 27th 13:00 UTC:  Community Meeting.  Community Meetings are open question and answer sessions where members of the Doc Team will be present to answer any question you might have.  Want to learn how to get involved?  What is Mallard?  What is the Doc Team doing for the upcoming GNOME 2.28 release?  Now is the time to come find out!
• Sunday, August 30th 17:00 UTC:  Team Meeting.  The last Sunday of each month the Doc Team has a more formal team meeting to discuss current projects, goals, and future planning.  The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the status of the new Empathy help and decide on which tasks we should prioritize for the upcoming Gnome 2.28 release.

Meetings are held in the #docs channel on GIMPNet IRC.  See you there!

Shaun McCance has announced a Mallard review meeting
for this Sunday at 17:00 UTC.

http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Meeting20090823

Please read the current specification here:

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/mallard/spec.html

Look for anything you think is crap or you think will cause
problems and take note of it.

Tell your friends.  Tell other documentation projects.  Tell
anyone that’s interested in Mallard.

It’s been a few weeks since our last team meetings, and now it’s time for more!

We will have an community meeting next Tuesday, July 21st at 18:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. CST).  Community meetings are your chance to ask any questions regarding GNOME documentation, Docbook, Mallard or more.

Our monthly project meeting is held the last Sunday of the month, which will be July 26th, at 19:00 UTC (2:00 pm CST).  We will discuss GNOME 3.0 goals and status, including Empathy updates for 2.28.  A draft of the agenda is available here.

Hope to see you there!

The GNOME Documentation Team has published their June status report, including:

• June accomplishments
• GNOME 3.0 goals and progress
• July goals

Additionally, the meeting minutes from our meeting this past Sunday are now available.

If you have any questions or feedback, please send us an email on the GNOME Documentation mailing list.

Shaun McCance has announced the release of gnome-doc-utils 0.17.2:

I've just released gnome-doc-utils 0.17.2, which includes
all the build magic for Mallard documents.  Using it is
similar to using the DocBook build magic, except:

1) You don't use DOC_MODULE.

2) Set DOC_ID to a system-unique identifier for the document.
This will determine where your document is installed.  For
instance, if "DOC_ID=empathy", then your document will go
into "/usr/share/gnome/help/empathy".

3) Set DOC_PAGES to the list of page files in your document.
Just as with DOC_ENTITIES or DOC_INCLUDES, do not include the
leading "C/".

DOC_ENTITIES, DOC_INCLUDES, DOC_FIGURES, and DOC_LINGUAS work
exactly as for DocBook documents.

We need to work on xml2po some.  Its default operation isn't
producing the best results for Mallard documents.

Those of you working on Mallard documents, please hammer on
this and let me know if you have any problems.

The Documentation team is having a team meeting tomorrow, Sunday June 28th at 9:00 p.m. UTC / 5:00 p.m. EST.

The meeting will be held in the #docs channel on GIMPnet IRC.

The agenda can be found here on our wiki page.

See you there!

The GNOME Docs Project has two meetings coming up this week.

Wednesday, June 24th at 7:00 p.m. UTC: Community Meeting

Have a question for the docs team? This is the place to ask any question you might have, such as:

• What was (and what was discussed) at the Writing Open Source conference members of the doc team recently attended?
• What is Project Mallard and why is it important?
• What is the difference between topic based and task based documentation?
• How can I get involved?
• I submitted a bug in Bugzilla, why isn’t it fixed?
• How can we make docs sexy?

This is the place to come.  Look for Paul Cutler, Milo Casagrande and Phil Bull in the #docs IRC channel on GIMPnet.

Sunday, June 28th, 9:00 p.m. UTC: GNOME Docs Project steering meeting

This meeting will discuss the project structure, roadmap for the documentation team and it’s tools including Yelp and gnome-doc-utils, GNOME 3.0 planning and more.

All are welcome to attend, though the meeting will be moderated, and the formal agenda will be posted to the wiki (as well as the minutes after the meeting) in the next few days.