[drupal-docs] Drupal documentation coordinator

[puregin]

Hello all,

     [please forgive the length of this post]

     I've been debating whether I should nominate myself for the
position of Documentation Coordinator.  I suppose I had two concerns:
i) I might be over-committing myself, and ii) I might fail miserably.

     Dries has kindly offered two means of escape from this position -
quitting - which covers my first concern; and being fired, which
seems to cover the second!

     Drupal is a wonderful thing, in its many aspects - software,
community, ideal...  it has been very rewarding to be involved, and to
see how quickly and well it has evolved in the little over a year
since I first learned about it.  I would be pleased to serve in any
capacity to advance Drupal.

     Documentation is certainly an area where much can be done.  There
is an impressive quantity of information contributed by a large
and talented army of volunteers.  Thanks to the great work of
Steven Wittens and others on Drupal's Search capabilities, it's
possible to quickly find stuff if one know what one is looking for.

     Still, as I read many of the comments in the Handbook, the threads
in Forums and in the support mailing list, I hear the message that
it's still far too difficult for many users to find information that
they can understand and apply.

     In large part, this seems to be due to a mismatch between
documentation user needs and the type of information available.  In
other words, the problem is one of organizing and presenting
information to suit a user's needs.  Kieran et al. have been doing
great work in trying to understand user needs and how Drupal
documentation might be matched to these.

     Drupal is many things to many people - offering the right kinds of
documentation to support them all will be a great challenge.
Fortunately, I've seen a great collective abundance of talents,
skills, ideas and energy in the documentation team, so I'm sure we
will find a way.  Seeing the work that Anisa, Kieran, Dries, Bryan,
Boris, Gabor, Charlie, judah, Dan, sp, Steven, vlado, Moshe and many
other have brought to drupal-docs over the last few months has been
inspirational, to say the least.

     If I am named to the position of Documentation co-ordinator, I
would hope to be able to execute my duties mostly by asking questions
and finding answers from the collective wisdom of the team.  I would
hope that Dries and all of the other long-standing contributors would
extend patience towards me and provide coaching and council as I try
to follow their example of leadership.  I'm very much a newbie in this
role.


Documentation Vision:

     To provide exactly the information a user needs, in the exactly
the right form, exactly when it is needed.


Goals:

     To make documentation a compelling feature of Drupal

     To showcase Drupal's flexible design and feature-set by presenting
     documentation in a way that will be the envy of all other
     projects

     To support the work of the documentation team through the
     evolution of appropriate technologies and tools

     To contribute to the development of Drupal's evolving capabilities
     by providing requirements from the documentation project

     To develop one or more books targeted for print publication


Qualifications:

     I've been involved with Drupal for a little over a year now, since
putting together http://www.bridgingtothefuture.org for one of my
clients.  I wish I could take credit for the graphical design work,
but it was done by my friend Felicia Lo at her firm planetfish.net :)

     I've contributed a little to Drupal core in the form of various
small patches.  Book module has been an interest of mine - I'm hoping
to be able to contribute towards a module to support the collaborative
authoring of Mathematics in TeX/LaTeX (my academic roots are showing,
I fear!)

     My current documentation-related project is ridding the current
handbook of embedded H1...H6 markup, and splitting nodes to provide
true sectional structure.  This should improve maintainability and
ease authoring of the handbook.  It will also help in the automatic
generation of PDF from the printer-friendly output, which I have been
developing on my site:

     http://www.puregin.org/files/Drupal_handbook.pdf

     I currently run my own little company, Cielo Systems, which is
mainly focused on Research & Development management in the software
industry.  I like to think of it as building bridges between the
culture of developers and the culture of management.

     I have been developing software on Unix and GNU/Linux platforms
for about twenty years, using C, perl, Java, TCL/Tk, PHP.

     I taught mathematics and computer science undergraduate courses at
the University of British Columbia for five years.

     I've written one book, and am currently about 65% finished
co-authoring a second, both in the field of Geometric Topology.

     I've served as chief technical editor and production manager for
three years on a project in which a team of about 25 part-time
contributors produced 600 pages of mathematical manuscript for print
per year.

     I was principal architect and developer on a project which
converted over 10,000 pages of automotive service manuals into an XML
database, based on a customized version of DocBook, for republication
in a variety of formats including print and HTML.

    ** Regards, Djun


On 5 May 2005, at 3:45 AM, Dries Buytaert wrote:

> Hello world,
>
> now the Drupal documentation mailing list has been established and we
> have a clue about how we are about to approach this, I think it would
> be a good idea to assign a "Drupal documentation (team) coordinator".
>
... snip...

>   If you are interested in the job,
> raise your hand, and plug yourself in a couple paragraphs.  Send your
> application to this mailing list for everyone to read and comment.
> Once assigned, he or she will be a "Benevolent Dictator for Life" until
> (i) he or she resigns or (ii) until I replace him or her.
>
> I know this does not sound very democratic, but let us keep it simple
> for now.  At this point, it is very much a test-case. If the
> "coordinator model" works, I'd be happy to extend it to other aspects
> of Drupal.  Much like Drupal, the "coordinator model" might evolve over
> time.  Step by step.  Thanks.
>
> --
> Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/
>