1. It’s easy (Yes, step one is, “It’s easy.”)
2. Click on this fancy link.
3. Look through the list of cities and find a city that is in the same time zone as where you will be on Sunday.
4. When you find a city such a city, look at the time that is listed next to it.

That will be the time of the meeting! You can join us in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on the freenode IRC network at that time, and we’ll have our meeting. We have a lot to cover, but we’ll prioritize things so that we only meet for an hour.

The focus of the meeting will be on the documentation team strategy document, as well as confirming our goals for the 11.10 release.

Hope to see you there!

My week at UDS was a challenging week. A great week. A week in which I had great discussions around docs, met lots of cool people, and wound up expanding the limits of what are normally considered acceptable sleep patterns.

I had three docs-team sessions during the week. I also attended two sessions about cloud-related documentation, and another session on server documentation. The three docs-team sessions focused on the team strategy, our goals for the 11.10 release cycle, and evaluating a web-based documentation platform.

Team Strategy

The inspiration for the team strategy discussion is the Xubuntu Strategy Document. Have you read it? When Cody Somerville first wrote it, part of me was like, “Are you serious? Did you write this yourself?” It seemed too complicated. In practice, though, I’ve seen the Xubuntu team reference that document while making decisions time and time again. I think a similar document would benefit the docs team, too. I’m preparing a draft document based off of recent team discussions, and will be sharing it in the next week.

Team Goals for the 11.10 Release

The team goals session was pretty great. People in the room, and people listening in via the audio casts, gave helpful input. There was more focus on the Ubuntu wiki at UDS than I anticipated. Some of our goals for this cycle include creating a strategy document, contributing to upstream docs projects, refactoring our team wiki, testing of documentation accessibility, testing a preferred help layout, doing stable release updates for docs and translations, squashing boogs, adopting a consistent coding style, updating our style guide (or picking an existing one), and doing some of the initial work in revamping help.ubuntu.com.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, but some of it is already a work in progress. We will make these goals explicit during our next team meeting.

Web-based Documentation Platform

The group behind this project is Pronovix, a Drupal consultancy. I knew that their project was using Drupal and DITA, but I wasn’t sure what *their project did*. They had some of their staff based in Hungary, just a short trip away from Budapest, so I thought it was worth getting in touch to learn more about their approach and how it might benefit us.

DITA stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML syntax developed by IBM that specializes in content profiling and content reuse. The advantage of content reuse with a tool like DITA is that it allows you to write something once, write it well, and reuse it most everywhere. That is the idea, at least. Implementation of DITA can be difficult. Their project has promise, but the toolchain isn’t currently packaged by any distro other than OpenSUSE. Harald Sitter (Mr. Apache Log File) felt that this very much limits the likelihood of upstream adoption.

Even with that in mind, we are going to seriously evaluate their platform. It was very considerate of this group to make a trip to demonstrate their project, and we want to be supportive of everyone who is working in open source documentation.

There are quite a few irons in our fire, and we’ll have to get word out about our activities somehow. Our progress will likely be presented via a new Ubuntu Documentation Team blog. We think now is a good time to start one up, so look for more info on that soon, as well.

Here is a quick peek at what we are doing:

Click to play

This is all done with Mallard and Yelp.

KDE, you can have this, too. Talk with Shaun McCance. Shaun has revamped the back-end of yelp so that it wouldn’t be crazily difficult to put a Qt front-end on it.

Just imagine it . . . You could call it “kelp.”

As for the docs, there is still much more to be done. Join us on #ubuntu-doc on IRC, or join the Ubuntu Documentation team mailing list to see how you can help out.

Update: I’ve spoken with another gedit developer, and have been given the ok to get the 2.3x docs updated once the 3.0 docs are ready. Obviously, 3.0 is the priority, but I will make this happen for Ubuntu + OpenSUSE. : )

For now, though, I’m at the Gnome 3 documentation hackfest with Phil Bull, Shaun McCance, Johannes Schmid, Tiffany Antopolski, Natalia Ruz, and Germán Póo-Caamaño. Scott Nesbitt of DMN Communications and Words on a Page fame plans to stop by over the weekend, and Ryan Lortie has been playing the part of gracious local host, doing airport pick-ups and coordinating our hotel stay / work locations. (Thanks, Ryan!)

So, what are we doing here? The primary focus for Shaun, Phil, Tiffany, Natalia, and myself is to re-work the Gnome User Guide for Gnome 3. We are using the Mallard syntax to write more topic-focused help, addressing specific needs of users rather than providing help in a long-form manual format. We’re currently on day three of the hackfest, but we have three and a half more days to go. We will need every day–there is still much to cover.

An additional focus of the hackfest is to write Gnome platform and developer documentation. This is primarily the focus of Johannes and Germán, but Shaun will be helping with this as well. Thus far, Johannes has been working on implementing Gnome-related programming tutorials in several different languages. Some of his tutorials feature sounds, and we hear bleeps and bloops coming from his laptop every now and then . . . he’s making some pretty good progress.

Some of you may recognize Phil Bull’s name, as he is on the Ubuntu doc team, too. That means two Ubuntu users contributing to upstream Gnome documentation. Phil is even writing parts of the shell documentation from within Unity. (Ok, he looks over at my laptop which is running Gnome 3). But still . . . Group hug, Ubuntu / Gnome. Group hug.

Finally, I know the rule of “pics or it didn’t happen, so here are a couple of images to tide you over for now.

(Yes, I know that the pics are a little too big for my blog settings for now . . . I’ll have to fix it later.)

Thanks to the Gnome Foundation for sponsoring my hotel stay, to Syllogist.net for the muffins in the morning, and to Seneca College Centre for Development of Open Technology for providing the space.

From the release announcement:

This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop
environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time
requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the
entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular)
from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop.
The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher
management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel
features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new
menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once
again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as
Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been
streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui
library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.

Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8
is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team
from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned
with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit,
udev and many more. A lot of old cruft has been stripped from the
core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still
around for compatibility reasons).

There will be several additional pre-releases prior to the final release in January.  Read the full release announcement (best viewed in Firefox) for more information about this particular pre-release build.

I had a long day at work today, and I haven’t had much time to review the agenda yet, but I am interested in hearing what other individuals have to say about it, and if any Loco teams would be interested in working to address some of the topics together.  Pushing some of our ideas “upstream,” seems like a very worthwhile endeavor.  :]

Ok, here are the pictures.  :]

Here’s some folks waiting on the streets of downtown Chicago to enter the rally.  A friend said that “the one,” was going to vote for, “that one.”  I’ll let you figure out what he meant by that.

While waiting in line we kept up on election happenings via cellphone television.  Though it isn’t present in this picture, I saw my first Tmobile G1 that night.

Here’s a photo of the big tent full of the international liberal media elite.    Quite a lot of light there, eh?

Here’s a nice shot of the crowd with the skyline in the background.

Sadly, I don’t have a great camera, and there was a lot of jostling about during Obama’s speech . . . but you can see that he’s there!

Here’s a photo of my friend and I after the rally.  Of course, with so many people around, it wasn’t likely that we would be able to take a photo without someone walking in front of us, but it was ok.  :]

* I think they called it Obamapalooza in part because it was a celebration, but also because the event took place in the same location as where they’ve held the Lollapalooza concerts for the past couple years.