[drupal-docs] Drupal documentation coordinator

[Charlie Lowe]

I, too, would like to add my name to the list of good candidates already 
  applying to be documenation coordinator. For those of you who don't 
know me, I'm a writing teacher, finishing up a PhD in rhetoric and 
composition studies with a specialization in electronic communication 
and intellectual property. And even though I don't code, I administer 
somewhere around 40 to 50 Drupal sites. I've also been teaching with 
Drupal for a few years now and run workshops on using Drupal for 
teachers. Administering Drupal sites, working with teachers and 
students, and offering some basic entry level support on the Drupal 
forums has given me a good understanding of what our target audience is 
like for the non-developer documentation. Believe me, I think I've heard 
almost every question imaginable :-) I've also been working with Drupal 
documentation for a couple of years now in various ways:

* During the summer and fall of 2003, I revised a few of the pages in 
the "Drupal modules and features" section and wrote the "About Drupal page."

* I wrote about 80% of the CivicSpace Configuration Guide: 
http://test2.cyberdash.net/?q=node/2.

* For the past year, I've been teaching technical writing classes in 
which students have been learning to write documentation about Drupal. 
Here's an example of some of their documentation work from last fall: 
http://osddp.org/files/issues/drupal_end_user_manual.pdf. (this project 
was a great learning experience for the students and turned out 
particularly well given that they were mostly science and engineering 
majors with no experience with Drupal prior to that semester).

As the documentation coordinator, here are some things I'd like to see:

* Developing more documentation for the documentation group like the 
handbook structure (http://dev.bryght.com/t/wiki/HandbookVersionTwo) and 
the new style guide, documents to include a simple roadmap of short and 
long term goals, a workflow outline, and better instructions on writing 
documentation (beyond that of the style guide). This would enable us to 
produce better documentation, make it easier for others to join in, and 
keep us on track.

* In codifying the workflow process and other documentation, simplify 
the process as much as possible. The more simple things are, the easier 
it will be for us to accomplish our goals.

* Do a documentation sprint every time there is a Drupal code freeze to 
update existing documentation to the new Drupal version.

* After the current initiative to revise the handbook is finished, work 
toward creating documentation with screen captures. I'll also be getting 
a version of Macromedia Captivate, so I'd like to personally start 
developing some Flash-based tutorials this fall. This sort of video 
documentation is very helpful to newbies.

Charlie Lowe