one thing that I noticed while talking to people
on OOoCon2006 in Lyon is that there is a *lot* of
writing potential in some native language groups.
Particularly the German (de) and French (fr) groups
apparently are very productive.
I think I can answer some of your points :-)
Thanks Sophie, yes, that answers most of my questions.
Thinking about that, the following questions
come to my mind (you may notice hat I like
bulleted lists...):
- How can we shamelessly exploit ;-) those talents
for the documentation "mother" project?
The difficulty is the language barrier. Most of our authors don't speak
or write English. However, I think that ideas or new concepts of
documentation could be shared. If I take the example of this work in
progress :
http://fr.openoffice.org/files/documents/67/3640/PublipostageRefCard1.odt
http://fr.openoffice.org/files/documents/67/3641/PublipostageRefCard2.odt
which are reference cards for advanced users on mailing. This can be
shared and adapted. Most of the work consist on collecting and
organizing the informations.
It would be good to have some sufficiently bilingual community
members to help with getting non-English content into English
(if we want to see English as "root language").
- How can we make sure that both docs and native
lang projects benefit from each other's docs
efforts? I know that we already link to the native
language docs pages but is there a closer connection
in place?
I don't think so. Some times ago, I was used to announce our work on the
NLC list, but I'm not doing it any more.
I admit that this is a tough one but we're probably
wasting a lot of good effort right now. I'm not saying
I have an answer for how to resolve this, though.
- Should we have someone with corresponding language
skills looking through the repositories and see
where there is room for synergy (buzzz!)?
At the very beginning of the documentation project, the idea was to
write the master in English and then translate it in other languages,
but that was really too hard and prevent some of our contributors to
participate (translating is not always very funny ;-) and some
documentations are public oriented (schools or administrations, etc) and
the approach could be different from a language to another.
Yes, "the master=English, all other langs=translated" approach is
pretty formal (and actually the model used inside Sun). The beauty
of this is the ease of administration and coordination. But for
community work this would also mean to demote non-English doc
contributors to be "mere" translators and a lot of talent would
probably be wasted.
So my idea would be to find some process that allows the communities
to act independenly, yet still in a coordinated fashion, so that
docs from one community can be pulled into the
mother-of-all-documentation projects (doc.oo.o).
- Talking about other projects: do we also go through
the developer projects to harvest what they write?
Not systematically, it depends of our resources, demands and licenses
Yeah, I know ;-)
:-) The difficulty also is to go through each project to find their
documentation and to be aware of the updates.
For example, I've bookmarked this link :
http://www.openoffice.org/files/documents/25/2570/commandsReference.html
but there is no reference to the project it belongs, is it xml, api, util?
I see what you mean. I know that I am stretching it now but should
we have documentation guidelines available for other projects that would
help us to leverage existing docs created in other projects?
Gerry, what's your take on all this?
Frank
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