This is a short summary of the IRC meeting we had on Tuesday, June 16 to discuss the new roadmap that was posted last week, http://drupal.org/node/488070. Lots of folks showed up and we had a god chat. Unfortunately we had to cut it off after an hour, but more meetings will be coming. You can get the full deal by reading the IRC transcript: http://pastebin.com/f4ee1b70f
The main things that were discussed were around the question of what this "content architecture" stuff is about. I'll reprint my best effort response here (though Becca would be able to explain better probably) and also note that the concern that we follow industry standards as a guideline so that we aren't striking off on our own.
The superquick skinny on the architecture is that we need to restructure how our content is presented to make it findable and easier to use. This means not just the navigation but also categories/tagging and looking at the structure of each page as well as the overall structure. Becca is leading this up and is starting to gather data about our content, users and community. We'll be asking for help on this in the next few weeks. As we sift through all of this stuff, Becca will come up with an "ideal" architecture to start from. We will then continue poking and prodding, doing cardsorts and testing until we feel we have a good arch to implement.
I also provided some clarification about the appendices that were attached to the roadmap draft. Appendices A and B are a brain dump of tasks that may be needed to accomplish our goals. At the Toronto sprint we had time to brainstorm tasks but not fill out any details or expand on them. Anyone that would like to dive into one of the goals can just use the task table outlines as a place to start in terms of figuring out what they need to consider and do. The appendix C mindmap is an easier to digest overview of A and B.
I talked a bit about the Writing Open Source conf that I attended and encouraged anyone interested to join the "wosdocs" community at http://writingopensource.com. We then also moved to a very brief conversation about some toolsets like docbook and DITA, though it was noted that we aren't at a place to get into those details until the architecture is done.
We then ended up discussing the fact that the roadmap has two priority goals right now (content architecture and recognition/rewards for contributors) but that if folks want to jump in on other tasks that don't depend on those two, they can get started. We will use the Community Inititives section to creating organizing pages, but create issues for the actual tasks/work that needs to happen. Feel free to email the mailing list to find others interested in working on similar goals.
We wrapped up talking about a number of topics like single-sourcing docs and Becca asked if anyone had any examples of good documentation for something with a similar goal as Drupal.
Whew, OK, it was a lot of talking, which was awesome! If you haven't taken the "thank you" survey on http://docs.drupaltest.org, please do. I'd like to have at least two meetings in July: one for a status report on the roadmap and another to begin our plan for Drupal 7 documentation. I'm on the road right now, but I'll send Doodles out for those meetings in the next week or so.