I’m stepping back from the Documentation Team.
The last few years have been a great experience. Working mainly with documentation and training – I’ve improved my writing style, my second language, led sessions on IRC and OpenWeeks, expanded my knowledge of unfamiliar areas whilst documenting, learned a great deal about working in distributed teams and above all met some great people along the way.
After a productive team meeting last night, the teams new structure was finalised: contributers (open), comitters (restricted) and wiki admins (restricted).
The main thing I wanted to draw attention to is that anyone interested in contributing should join Ubuntu Documentation Contributers.
I’ve been trying to get to as much of OpenWeek as I could and have really enjoyed a lot of the sessions. Dustin Kirkland’s session on encrypted home folders and of course the Docs Day sessions were fantastic 
So I was wondering what everyone’s favourites so far were…
My favourite comment was from Mark Shuttleworth during his Q&A, I’ve seen similar questions asked so many times but I’ve never seen an answer as succint:
(12:24:03 PM) jcastro: <rabbit251> jcastro: QUESTION: Do you see Wine (and Windows-compatibilty in general) or native Linux ports as the more important ingredient in the success of Ubuntu, or do they each play an important role? (12:24:18 PM) sabdfl: they both play an important role (12:24:30 PM) sabdfl: but fundamentally, the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules (12:24:41 PM) sabdfl: it is *different* to the proprietary software universe (12:24:54 PM) sabdfl: we need to make a success of our own platform on our own terms (12:25:08 PM) sabdfl: if Linux is just another way to run Windows apps, we can't win (12:25:13 PM) sabdfl: OS/2 tried that
I’ve started using the last two lines as my email signature.
Ubuntu OpenWeek starts on Monday 27th April. The Documentation Team has five sessions starting on the 28th at 18:00 UTC which we’re referring to as “Docs Day”. Quite a change from Intrepid where I gave a single one hour session covering everything (the IRC log is available here)!
Our team has quite a high number of new people volunteering but seems to have have trouble converting these into long term members. Its difficult to identify why but in the Karmic cycle we have a couple of initiatives to announce:
Our first Playbook – “Fixing Bugs in the System Documentation” is available now and I encourage anyone to download a copy, make suggestions and have a go!
The Documentation Team is always looking for volunteers. You can apply to join the team on Launchpad – we just ask for an introduction on our mailing list. You don’t need to join to contribute, feel free to submit patches to the mailing list or on Launchpad.
Documentation string freeze is rapidly approaching (March 26th) and I’ve not managed to get as much feedback on NetworkManager as I would have liked in order to make some really useful documentation.
Connection is one of those things that if a new user hits it, it can be a major problem – especially when so much help is available on the Internet! This often results in frustrated users who can only look to the little blue circle with the question mark.
The thing is though, I’m to blame too. I know how to troubleshoot networking problems, so it’s unlikely that I approach the problem from the same aspect as a newcomer, so might be answering a question that no-one asked!
With only two of NetworkManager’s currently supported connections – the documentation is lacking in three areas: VPN, DSL and the one I’m most worried about, Mobile Internet. I’d also love to reach more of a consensus on how to document dial-up connections.
So, now I’ve got a feed to Planet Ubuntu, I can hit a much wider audience and who are likely to have overcome any issues they encountered.
I need your experiences connecting using NM:
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