Once more unto the breach, dear friends

[rho]

Open Beta has arrived, I've had the 3 days of sleep that I needed to recover from the insane rush to get things written in time, I've looked on in awe at denise and mark who were in even more of a mad rush than I was and haven't hadn't a chance to slow down since, and I'm thinking it's about time I started the documentation train rolling again. So, on with the motley, viva the mixed metaphor, and away we go!

Stuff that needs doing:

• There's still some feedback in recent posts here that need dealing with.
• We need to set up a proper process for people to report issues with site copy and documentation and get it set up.
• There are still some outstanding code issues that need fixing. The most pressing ones that I can think of are bug 703 and bug 816 (end user related) and bug 723 (admin related).
• At some point, we also need to start thinking about how we're going to tear out the existing documentation system and rewrite it from scratch so it better suits our needs. That's one for the future, though.
• The few bits of FAQ that didn't get finished off before Open Beta need finishing. These bits were generally down to the people who were working on them coming down ill at at a bad time, so I'm hoping they'll be able to finish them soon.
• I also want to completely redo the paid accounts FAQ, since it was thrown together hastily in a "we need somewhere to put this information up now if not sooner" sort of way and it shows.
• There are a lot of guides that need writing beyond the three we have in place now.
• We also need to start thinking about the KBs and how we're going to do them.
• (Aside: for those who weren't here when we got sarted, the plan was to have a three tier documentation system: FAQs would be in a simple question/answer format, Guides would take a take a topic and discuss it in depth and could be read without any specific question but with a desire to learn about some feature in general, and Knowledge Bases would be more like a complete user manual with just a large information dump.)
• We need to go through everything that's been written so far and check for consistency in naming and terminology, etc.
• I want to go through the FAQ (and guides) and in all cases where there's a reference to some text that appears on site, I want to replace the hard-coded text wit a reference to the translation string so that if we change the site text, the FAQ will still stay accurate.
• I want to coordinate with the accessibility team to make sure that we're being as accessible as we can. We've been trying to avoid visual language, use alt and title attributes, etc. but it's not something that a lot of us are used to and I know there are places where we could do better. There are also some parts of the site that are really hard to document in a non-visual way because the pages themselves aren't designed well for accessibility.
• We'll need to coordinate with the support team as well, to check what sort of documentation they need to do their job properly, what sort of questions they're getting asked frequently. I suspect we'll want to have at least one person acting as a liaison between support and documentation, though I'm not sure about that yet.
• We need to work on training up new people, teaching them our writing style, etc. This includes figuring out what process we're going to use for this and on making sure that we have good internal documentation for people to learn from.

Up until now, I've been focussed on getting us up to this stage and hadn't given all that much thought to how we were going to move forwards from here. I've had some thoughts, obviously, but a lot of things are still up in the air.

What I'd ideally like to happen would be for everyone interested to identify something that they wanted to work on and then go and do it with minimal intervention from me. I am a fundamentally lazy person, and am at my happiest when things get done without me having to lift a finger. :)

What I need from you for now:

• For people on the team already, what (if anything) are you currently working on?
• For anyone wanting to help, whether already on the tea or not, what would you like to do, and what help or guidance would you need to be able to do it?
• People who aren't already on the team but want to be but don't know what they want to do, please tell me so.
• People who are on the team who are willing to help hold hands and train up new people, please tell me.
• If you have any thoughts on how best to do any of the stuff that needs doing, please let me know.

Once I've got feedback on this, I'll start formulating a Grand Master Plan for how we can move forward. It may or may not involve shark-mounted lasers.

Comments

[wintercreek]

I am not on the team but would like to help! I am an awesome proofreader (for both grammar and content/clarity), if I do say so myself. So if you need beta readers, please count me in.

I could probably also help in other ways, but I don't know off the top of my head what they might be. Ask and perhaps I'll do it!