Documentation team

Hey all -

DrupalCon Chicago's Core Conversation proposals need to be in by next Friday. Jennifer (jhodgdon) and I have been pondering whether and what might make a good topic or two to pitch.

Please post with ideas and whether you'd be interested in attending a docs focused session, it'll help us gear our proposal towards something everyone will be interested in!

Thanks!

I just finished updating http://drupal.org/upgrade this page just basically explains what a update / upgrade is, and links to other pages. I then found http://drupal.org/node/548922 which is very similar. I'm not sure if /upgrade is now complete or still needs work. How does someone know if it's complete? I personally think the links off of it are not in the best order or work quite right but I didn't know what the focus or intent of the page or links were. Personally I'd like to see the text of the update.txt posted. Why make someone open that file?

A long time ago I got to spend a few years watching and learning from a man named Sherwin as he led a church choir. He was an absolute master in the realm of motivating volunteers. Here are some of the things I learned:

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Hey fellow docs enthusiasts!

As some of you may have seen, there is going to be a big Docs Sprint in Vancouver in December (come join us if you're nearby!) The other part of what's going on that weekend, is that the core Docs Team members traveling here, as well as a few core devs (webchick, chx, and dmitrig01) will be gathering on Friday to discuss the Docs Team structure and initiatives in a dedicated retreat style afternoon.

We'll be discussing and brainstorming about things like:

After a big discussion with some of the core devs who attended the PNW Drupal Summit last weekend, I've created a page for people who don't consider themselves part of the Docs Team to sign up as willing to mentor people working on Docs. http://drupal.org/node/936522

The idea is that people working on docs often need help with technical details of what they're documenting, and don't know who they can ask. The people I was talking to were more than willing to help out, and we also talked about pairing up docs people with contrib maintainers so they can help maintain project-specific docs.

At dinner tonight Add1sun and I chewed over the question:

Why does Drupal's contrib maintenance model largely work, and handbook maintenance does not work?

While Drupal's contrib area is certainly not perfect, it has active maintenance on many projects, and a clear sense of ownership, and rules that go with that ownership. Everybody can contribute in the issue queue, and everybody can comment in the issue queue. But the maintainers are responsible for the their project.

A ping in #drupal-docs earlier has brought to my attention that the Docs style guide only applies to handbook and not explicitly to interface text in Drupal core/contrib.

I'd think it should apply so we get consistent text and grammar formatting Drupal-wide, but didn't want to make such a sweeping declaration without some consensus from the community at large.

With a quick run-through of the program, I didn't see any talks of BoFs related to documentation on the CPH site.

I'm very interested in starting to help out with Drupal documentation, and I know there will be a need for a big push with D7. I'm just not sure where to start. I was hoping to meet up with some people in Copenhagen to give me a quick primer and sketch out some of the areas most in need of work.