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Bringing in more people
This entry isn't really going to be saying anything concrete. It's mainly just me putting some of my thoughts onto pixels. I'd very much appreciate any thoughts that any of you have on this, though.
At various points, from when I first took over the documentation project to this morning, I've had various people expressing an interest at getting involved with FAQs/copy/proof-reading/whatever and I've had to turn them down, for one reason or another. It breaks my heart a little bit every time I've had to do that, because I really firmly believe that everyone has something useful to offer and everyone should be able to concentrate.
The problem, for now, is that expediency is trumping pretty much all other concerns. We have a bunch of things that we need to get written by Open Beta, and getting them written is my priority. Paradoxically, asking more people to contribute at this point would be counter-productive to this goal. Time spent training people up to write in our style and to use our tools would take away from the time we have to actually write things.
In choosing my teams, one thing I was looking out for was people who I thought would be able to get writing with minimal training: people who were self0sufficient in learning new skills, for instance, or people whose natural writing styles mostly closed matched the Dreamwidth style.
Fortunately, writing documentation is a lot like writing a book. It's impossible to ever finish. There'll always be some wording that could be made clearer, some feature that isn't documented properly, or some new way of presenting things. No matter how good our documentation is, we'll always be able to make it better.
As we move on after the Open Beta launch, I want to try to bring as many people as possible into the process. The development team are doing a wonderful job of getting new people involved and training them up (![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_dev_training for instance) and I want to use what they're doing as a model for what we can do over here.
One of the problems will be that we don't have the same tools as the devs do. We don't have any nice mechanism for people to submit patches to update site copy or FAQs. We have just two options: either we can say "hey, I think that this should say this instead" or we can put it actually live on the site. This is less than ideal.
In the long-term, we're going to be scrapping the existing FAQ system and translation system and replacing them with new, better systems of our own devising. One thing that I'm keen on working into the new system from the start is some decent form of version control. I want for us to be able to make changes and have them sitting in the back-end where we can look at them, and then to be able to put them onto the live site when we're happy with them.
For now though, that isn't an option, so we'll have to figure out some other way of doing things. One possibility is to let everyone who's interest make suggestions for additions and improvements, but instead of just saying "yes" or "no" for us to then work with you to let you know why we think it's a good or a bad idea, how you can improve your suggestion, and so on. That way, hopefully, we'd be able to have people improve, and eventually reach the point where they'd be the ones who are giving the advice and making the actual changes on site.
I'm not really sure what the best way to try to organise this will be, nor even if it's going to be a good idea to have any sort of formal organisation at all. I just know that the general idea of bringing more people into the fold is one I'm committed to.
So what do you think? If you're currently on the team, how would you feel about helping to train up new people? If you aren't currently on the team, what would be most useful to you and make you want to get involved?
At various points, from when I first took over the documentation project to this morning, I've had various people expressing an interest at getting involved with FAQs/copy/proof-reading/whatever and I've had to turn them down, for one reason or another. It breaks my heart a little bit every time I've had to do that, because I really firmly believe that everyone has something useful to offer and everyone should be able to concentrate.
The problem, for now, is that expediency is trumping pretty much all other concerns. We have a bunch of things that we need to get written by Open Beta, and getting them written is my priority. Paradoxically, asking more people to contribute at this point would be counter-productive to this goal. Time spent training people up to write in our style and to use our tools would take away from the time we have to actually write things.
In choosing my teams, one thing I was looking out for was people who I thought would be able to get writing with minimal training: people who were self0sufficient in learning new skills, for instance, or people whose natural writing styles mostly closed matched the Dreamwidth style.
Fortunately, writing documentation is a lot like writing a book. It's impossible to ever finish. There'll always be some wording that could be made clearer, some feature that isn't documented properly, or some new way of presenting things. No matter how good our documentation is, we'll always be able to make it better.
As we move on after the Open Beta launch, I want to try to bring as many people as possible into the process. The development team are doing a wonderful job of getting new people involved and training them up (
dw_dev_training for instance) and I want to use what they're doing as a model for what we can do over here.One of the problems will be that we don't have the same tools as the devs do. We don't have any nice mechanism for people to submit patches to update site copy or FAQs. We have just two options: either we can say "hey, I think that this should say this instead" or we can put it actually live on the site. This is less than ideal.
In the long-term, we're going to be scrapping the existing FAQ system and translation system and replacing them with new, better systems of our own devising. One thing that I'm keen on working into the new system from the start is some decent form of version control. I want for us to be able to make changes and have them sitting in the back-end where we can look at them, and then to be able to put them onto the live site when we're happy with them.
For now though, that isn't an option, so we'll have to figure out some other way of doing things. One possibility is to let everyone who's interest make suggestions for additions and improvements, but instead of just saying "yes" or "no" for us to then work with you to let you know why we think it's a good or a bad idea, how you can improve your suggestion, and so on. That way, hopefully, we'd be able to have people improve, and eventually reach the point where they'd be the ones who are giving the advice and making the actual changes on site.
I'm not really sure what the best way to try to organise this will be, nor even if it's going to be a good idea to have any sort of formal organisation at all. I just know that the general idea of bringing more people into the fold is one I'm committed to.
So what do you think? If you're currently on the team, how would you feel about helping to train up new people? If you aren't currently on the team, what would be most useful to you and make you want to get involved?
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I was going to suggest a section of the dev wiki could be devoted to site copy with zero additional effort. Just create a FAQ_draft category, and voila.
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(My experience has been that either the discussion all goes to email / IM / in person with the wiki edit being the 'final destination' and/or people engaging in endless rounds of 'I disagree so I just change it' 'but I was right! I just change it back!' with increasing levels of irritation, when some conversation about the *why* would have made the whole thing less painful and more useful.)
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This has been my experience too. What I've seen that seems to work well is having one central area, like an entry in a comm, where the original draft of whatever the group is editing resides (ex. a FAQ page). It's only accessible to one or two people charged with actually changing the text around as consensus is reached.
Then there's a discussion thread where people can come in and say "From X to Z needs to be changed because the explanation is too complicated; let's try something like ::blatherblatherblather::", "This section doesn't provide clear explanation for people with vision issues; here's what we can do to fix that...", or "We need to find and replace all gendered pronouns to they/themselves or zie/hir/hirself", etc. And people can reply to each other and engage in discussion with each individual issue at hand.
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Also: wiki. Yep.
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In any case, thanks for the explanation. Makes sense, and makes me feel a bit better. :)
(And as for you, Internal Editor... Yes, this is a post about editing, but you don't have to jump up and down over every typo or misplaced hyphen.)
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I have zero interest in writing but I'm a proofreader and would love to help out in that arena, if such skills are needed.
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I would love helping out with a project/things that I totally dig. :) I am an avid gamer and can't help but throw myself up for some extra tasks for the guild(s) I am in as well, be it setting up and admining a forum online or just by keeping track of whatnot in game or adding/editing info on the eq2 wikia for instance. /smiles I guess I just like to be a bit more actively involved in stuff that I enjoy on a daily basis, then to just be a user/member. I do think I have what it takes to work in a team and while I am not a programmer/developper I do know how to work with codes and sorts. I think I do anyway ;-)
As for what would be handy to have as reference for new team members.. I'd have to think some more about that.
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We're currently not planning to translate into any other language. We've given it a lot of thought, and while it's something that we'd ideally like to be able to do, we just don't think it's something that we can properly do justice to. Creating and -- even more so -- maintaining a translation is a whole lot of work (as I'm sure you know). If we had translations, we'd want to be able to have the translation always be complete and up to date, and we just don't see any way of doing that with volunteers. After a lot of soul-searching, we decided that we'd rather have no translations at all than translations that were incomplete and out of date. If we're doing something, we want to be sure we can do it right.
This may change at some point in the future, but it's not something that's currently on the radar.
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i have a (stolen) novel solution. if you have ever read Irregular Webcomics, the webcomicartist used to do, and now does a different, "volunteer webcomic"
he basicly pooled the volunteers (by type - writer, artist, colorer, letter-er, etc) and set up a rotation - there were like 200 writers (that was the only group i was in) and there was, IIRC, a single webcomic scheduled a week... so he generated the list (by timestamp on the email, but however) and just had the rotation go through: comicwriter1 wrote the first open script, comicwriter2 wrote the second, etc.
it sounds really simplistic, and i only suggest it because i am guessing you will have *lots* of volunteers, and a lot of times simple solutions are perceived as being *too* simple. if you are as inundated as i expect, you'll totally need to both ride herd on us and pass things out easily. i am sure there are multiple ways to make this sort of system work specifically for you guys - i'm just trying to give you a basic look.
and hey, if there is a *better* way, it would be useful to learn that, too lol.
all that said, i'm a decent proofwriter and am a Communications(Journalism)/Political Science major (senior year). use away :)
(as a sorta personal question; do you think after you guys are more up-and-running you would be willing to try an internship sort of thing? i ask because i am disabled, hip displaysia, surgery didn't work - i have issues sitting up for more than about an hour, and all the internships i can find require 6-8 hour workdays *in* the office, no working-at-home sort of things, and i cannot do that sort of work setting. i am not really asking, asking, right now; i am throwing out an idea, expecting you [the entire team] to not even really think about for months, just let it bubble in your collective subconscious 8-) )
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As for internships, we aren't going to be able to afford paid staff for quite some time -- see Mark's answer to the dw_biz Q&A -- so we are going to be highly dependent on people volunteering. Both Mark and I come from the LiveJournal volunteer culture, where the expectation was always that you would do what you could, when you could, as you had the time and energy to do it. There's actually a very high percentage of people with disabilities already volunteering with Dreamwidth in some way or another, because a lot of people who are living with disabilities in some way or another are often out of the workforce and looking for something to channel their energy and passion into! (I'm disabled myself, so I know how important it is to have something that you can work on, in your own time, at your own energy level.)
So yeah, long story short: there will be many many opportunities for volunteerism, and we're very aware of the needs of people with disabilities and are very very committed to making volunteering possible/easy, no matter what your individual accessibility needs are. (And we're glad you're interested!)
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thats why i asked, because its online and in one of your posts you mentioned that you were disabled and how this particular venue is good for accomidating it (i can't spell today; i can't even wake all the way up.)
but internships are generally unpaid; i was asking, essentially, if at a later point i became a constant/consistant sort of volunteer and everyone is happy, can you (or whomever) sigh the paperwork to allow me to get school credit for interning. (that being the difference between volunteer and intern :) i was not asking for a paid job of any sort... while i am excited about DW, when i grow up (whenever i get around to it, i mean i'm already 32 and not grown up lol) i plan on working for the State dept, hopefully in an embassy. which i could not do if i were working for someone else :D
i will go ahead and put the volunteers on watch, or whatever the word here is :) (it will let me watch, but when i click the link to join, i get a 404 message. i don't know if this is you or me...)
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now i just have to convince the SCHOOL, when it comes time :)
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Also I like kittens. ♥
Contact me here or at red nigh ten gale at gm a il dot co m!
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Maybe in the future.
You're doing a great work. Just wanted to say that.
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A training team, I think, would be preferable, so that everyone is on the same page as far as what things are permissible and what are not, etc.