Drupal 8 User Guide - Inaugural Update

Wow! Thanks to everyone who commented on our proposal to create a Drupal 8 user guide. We read all of the comments carefully, and have made a plan for how to get this manual written, edited, and tested:

• Amber Matz (Amber Himes Matz), Joe Shindelar (eojthebrave), and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) will be managing the project, at least initially. Amber will concentrate on volunteer/project management, and Joe and Jennifer will concentrate on content oversight. The other members of the Documentation Working Group will also be participating.
• The guide will be organized into individual, short "task" and "concept" topics. There will be a guiding "scenario" to fit all the topics into -- a web project to use in the examples.
• Joe and Jennifer have been at the Twin Cities Drupal Camp the last few days, and we have picked a scenario (a site for a farmers market) and brainstormed a list of topics for the guide. The topic list is still a work in progress, but there are some topics that we're absolutely sure we'll need for the guide, so we have enough to get people started writing them. We will continue to revise the rest of the topics in the list and then share that so we can get feedback on the overall outline of the guide.
• We received MANY offers of help! So we are currently planning to have volunteer members of the Drupal community write the topics. We are deferring applying for grant funding for now, until we figure out if we need grant funding.
• We wrote up guidelines and instructions for contributors, and set up a site where you can view the guide in progress as we go:
  • Start at the Project page: https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide and it will get you going on the rest of this!
  • In-progress guide: https://userguide-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/d8guide/en/index.html
  • Guidelines and instructions: https://userguide-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/guidelines/index.html
  • Within the Guidelines site, the Practicalities page includes a section on getting proper credit for your work as a project participant. Please read this (as well as the other guidelines and instructions) if you want to participate.
  • We've worked with the Licensing Working Group to ensure that we are adhering to the correct policies, and ensuring that our project which is licensed CC-BY-SA can still be hosted on the Drupal.org infrastructure.
  • The goal will be to have this guide included directly on Drupal.org in the future, but for now this allows us to begin writing the guide while we continue to sort out some of the other logistics.
• This work will actually start on Sunday, June 28 (tomorrow, at least in our time zone) at a sprint (or work day), both in-person at the Twin Cities Drupal Camp and remote.
• We plan to have regular meetings for this project in IRC. The kickoff meeting is next Thursday, July 2.
• We'll be making status reports and other announcements here on https://groups.drupal.org/documentation -- sign up as a member so you can receive notifications.
• We've also set up an email list for participants, with public-visible archives. Joining is totally voluntary! If you have trouble joining, contact Joe, Amber, or Jennifer through our contact forms and we'll get you signed up.

OK, that's about it for this update -- see you at the sprint tomorrow and the meeting next week!