Announcement

In conjunction with Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Google is hosting a "Doc Sprint Summit" at Google's Mountain View headquarters (California) 17 October - 21 October. I don't know anything about it besides what's here: https://sites.google.com/site/docsprintsummit/

The summit will consist of:
a) An un-conference on open-source documentation topics

Hey Team -

I just wanted to let you all know I'm going to be scaling back my duties for the remainder of the summer (until DrupalCon London). I'll still be around-ish - will keep an eye on the docs queue for urgent business and probably work on some docs independently, but I won't be doing much team management until closer to the Con.

If you need my feedback on something more urgent, feel free to email me through the contact form, or leave a message for me on IRC (though I may be slower than usual to respond).

Two announcements:

Docs hour Tuesday (tomorrow!)

June is Bring a friend to Docs month! Join us tomorrow for Docs hour, bring a friend if you can, and we'll work on getting pages set back to "No known problems" (or review/discuss anything else needed).

Tuesday, June 7, 1pm PST/4pmEST in #drupal-docs on IRC.

Documentation contributor links block is back!

During Docs Hour on IRC today, we thought up something a bit different to do for June...

June is "Bring a friend to Docs" month!

There are no issues tagged for a June sprint this time round, instead we're going to do a fun team building sprint to help get new people introduced and oriented with how to work on docs! Here's how it works:

Note: As of April 2012, individual Docs Office Hours events are being posted to http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and the schedule has changed, so the post below is not current. You can also find the office hours events on the site-wide Events calendar of IRC meetings.

Hey Team -

Hello Doc peeps.
I was thinking of ways I would like to contribute to Drupal. I used to work in marketing at a computer company doing nofin but making documents. And, I'm also learning Drupal. My big idea for contributing is to ask questions like,
"Why is $node or $form, for example, not listed in the Globals API list of variables which includes $user?"

Greetings, Documentation Team!

Just wanted to raise to your attention that Google is sponsoring a program to help 13-18 year olds get involved in open source called Google Code-In:http://code.google.com/opensource/gci/2010-11/index.html. The program runs Nov. 22 - January 10, and the past incarnation (GHOP) netted us rockstars such as Jimmy Berry (who wrote the infrastructure for our automated testing bot), Daniel Wehner (who is now a Views co-maintainer), and Charlie Gordon (who has done a bunch of work in core on SimpleTest and D7UX patches).

This summer, we are doing a project in which we learn Drupal/Open Source skills while helping gardening initiatives. Participants will build Drupal projects that foster "Garden Storytelling." Technically, we might create: recipes for Drupal sites, glue modules, and simple sites that act as web services. Our audience is primarily Drupallers & Community Gardeners. There are about 40 participants overall, half of whom are already involved with Drupal in some form.

An important part of what we will be learning will be documentation.

This weekend in Seattle I met up with a few folks to talk about some larger documentation team issues which have come to light as a result of a tumultuous year for me personally, which caused me to withdraw from the community and my role as doc team lead. I realize that as the Drupal community has grown and changed, we have outgrown a model where one person alone can coordinate such a huge area as documentation. I asked several people, who had stepped in to fill leadership gaps and contacted me about general leadership concerns, to help me come up with a better plan for a sustainable doc team organization.

Based on various discussions over the last year, it seems that part of the solution involves improving the channels for communication and another part involves sharing leadership with as many people as possible. I feel that these changes will not only help us get docs back on track, but will make the documentation team stronger and more flexible as we head on down the road.

So we are getting close to Drupalcon now. We have two days for sprinting (Sept. 1 and Sept. 5) and we should have a bit of a game plan going in. I have a rough outline for at least the first day of sprinting, Sept 1. In addition to just getting work done, I would also like to schedule some topical meetings. To best figure out when, please let me know if you are interested in attending a topical meeting by filling in the Doodle for the topics you are interested in (see below) and please pay head to the timezone selector.