Documentation

Announcing DocuMENTORS - the Documentation Team Mentoring Programme

Have you ever wanted to contribute to Ubuntu, but don’t have the time to learn a programming language or aren’t multilingual enough to help with translations? Then look no further than DocuMENTORS!

Writing documentation is a great way to get involved with the Ubuntu community - not only can you write help articles for millions of Ubuntu users worldwide, you’ll learn about DocBook, Subversion and a whole host of other tools used every day by members of the Free software community too.

The mentoring programme gives you access to existing members of the Ubuntu Documentation Team. Your mentor will help you to get started writing documentation and will be there to answer your questions and to guide you where necessary. We hope that after a few weeks of mentoring you’ll be confident enough writing DocBook to start sending patches in yourself, which will be made available as part of the system documentation in the upcoming Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu.

What are you waiting for? The Doc Team needs you!

Documentation Team Mentoring Meeting

2007-07-25 20:00
2007-07-25 22:00
Etc/GMT

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2007-July/008754.html

Your recipes needed for the Official Ubuntu Book!

With the huge success of the Official Ubuntu Book, work is afoot to create a revised edition for Feisty, and we again need your help!

One of the chapters of the book provides a range solutions to common problems in the Ubuntu system. This chapter has been a hugely popular part of the book. Although a range of recipes have already been published, many of which from contributors, we are looking for more of your contributions to make it even better. With your contributions of recipes, the chapter becomes far more expansive and will cover a greater range of areas.

If you are interested in contributing, you should first take a look at this wiki page to see which recipes have already been written. If your idea is not already there, write it up and send it to Corey at corey.burger AT gmail AT com. Those recipes selected for inclusion in the book will get a free signed copy of the book.

When writing your recipe, bear the following points in mind:

  • Each recipe should be under 700 words
  • Recipes should be submitted in plain text
  • Keep your language direct and active. Don’t tell the reader what you are going to do, just do it. A great way of avoiding indirect writing is to strip the word ‘will’ out of everything that you write.
  • Each recipe should have a title such as ‘My USB key does not work’. Keep this short and to the point.

The deadline for all submissions is Wed 14th Feb 2007!

Good luck! See below for the terms and conditions.

Terms and Conditions

Not all recipes that are submitted can be used. Recipes will be edited for style where required. If your recipe is selected, you will be asked to sign an agreement with the following terms:

Grantee is Prentice Hall PTR and Grantor is yourself.

  • Grantor hereby assigns and transfers the Work to Grantee without limitation or restriction, as the sole and exclusive property of Grantee and with the exclusive right to publish and sell the Work in all countries and in all languages, copyright it and to renew any or all of the copyrights in Grantee’s name or any other name.
  • Grantor warrants that he/she is the sole owner of said material and that he/she has full power and authority to copyright it and to make this agreement; that the said material does not infringe any copyright, violate any property rights, or contain any libelous or unlawful matter; and that he/she will defend, indemnify and hold harmless the Grantee against all claims, losses, costs including attorney’s fees) and damages in connection arising out of any breach or alleged breach of these warranties.

Wiki Weekend - your chance to contribute to Ubuntu documentation

This weekend 20-21 January 2007 has been officially declared a WikiWeekend. This is an initiative similar to the legendary Ubuntu Bug Day, except for documentation!

It was started by K.Mandla of the Forums to encourage contributions to the Community Documentation wiki. Now it’s going global, and we need your help!

All you need to do is dedicate some of your time this weekend, however small, to improve the documentation. It’s one of the easiest ways to give something back to the Ubuntu Community.

To find out how to get involved, visit the WikiWeekend page and the forum thread.

Screencast Team

Matthew East has announced the creation of a Screencast Team, and they need your help!

Screencasts are videos which show users how to achieve a specific task in Ubuntu. They can be seriously useful when walking users through a new task and are intended to complement Ubuntu’s other support resources, such as documentation, forums, mailing lists and irc.

The project is led by Alan Pope, who has already done some great work on screencasts. But now the project is expanding, and you can help out! Simply head over to the team wiki page and soak up the material there. You’ll then be ready to contribute to the team by requesting or even making new videos!

Contact the Documentation Team with any questions or simply to get involved!

Documentation Team Meeting

2006-11-24 21:00
2006-11-24 22:00
Etc/GMT

Agenda at the usual wiki page

Cook up your Edgy recipes for next Official Ubuntu Book


Ubuntu chef? Get cooking those new recipes

For a few weeks now, the Official Ubuntu Book has been released, and the reaction has been incredibly positive. The book is available in print as well as under a free license. Some chapters of the book are even included in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, click SystemHelpUbuntu Book Except).

One of the most valuable chapters in the book, and one that many reviewers found compelling, was the chapter filled with recipes to solve common problems. Eager-eyed readers of The Fridge will know that there was a call for recipes some months back to fill the book with your experience.

As we now edge towards edgy (no pun intended), we are looking for some more recipes for cool things in edgy. So, now we need your help again. We are looking for some more recipes, and like the previous call for recipes, we are looking for interesting solutions to problems, clever tips and tricks, and other fun and useful tweaks. There will not be a print edition for Edgy, but the recipes will be used in the free online documentation.

The deadline for this is pretty short and is 22:00 UTC on Monday 18th September. Send all your submissions to the awesome Corey Burger at corey.burger AT gmail DOT com.

Don’t forget: you must sign the agreement, attached to this article, before we can use your recipe. Don’t worry, you’re not signing your life away :)

Official Ubuntu book published

The Official Ubuntu Book is now available from booksellers, featuring everything you need to know about:

  • Ubuntu and Kubuntu as desktop operating systems
  • Ubuntu server installation and basic administration
  • the Ubuntu community, how it works and how you can get involved.

It also features a DVD with the latest Ubuntu version.

It’s written by our very own Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse and Ivan Krstic, with contributions from many of Doc Team and other parts of the Ubuntu community.

You can order your copy now from your local book shop or:

Amazon UK
Amazon USA

New ForumWiki team

Many Ubuntu users have found out that the wealth of knowledge available on the Ubuntu Forums is almost endless, as it seems there is an answer for almost every question. There are also a lot of forum users who contribute amazing guides to the howto section of the forum.

Until now most of this information hasn’t found its way into the documentation that is made available in Ubuntu systems and on the Ubuntu documentation website.

Now, Matthew East has announced a new team to pull the information from the forums and channel it into the documentation.

This team will provide a vital bridge between the mountain of information on the Ubuntu forums and the official Ubuntu documentation.

To find out more details on the new project, including how to contribute, visit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/forum.

[Discuss this article on the Ubuntu forums]

Ubuntu Magazine naming: vote early, vote often

The poll for your favourite release of K/Ubuntu has been up for nearly as long as the DCC Alliance has been dead. Guess what, a truely whopping 85% of you rated Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) as the ruler of the releases and king of kompetition. Congratuations to the Duck (or was it a Dragon?).

Vidya Ayer suggested on the ubuntu-marketing mailing list that we have a poll to replace the current one. To help her and the rest the magazine team pick the title of the new Ubuntu Magazine, we’ve picked out a few names on the left-hand side. If you’ve got a suggestion, you can add it over at The Ubuntu Forums, or just select which one should be top of the titles!

Anyone interesting in helping the Magazine project get off the ground should check out the Magazine Project Charter which has a bunch of pretty colourful diagrams available showing how they’re expecting everything might in future.

[Post your own Magazine Titles on the Ubuntu Forums]