There isn't a long history or process of managed updates to the User Guide. A rewrite took place in late 2019 / early 2020 and regular updates began only in recent months. Until now the team has been small (barely a team!) and mostly driven by Louise (UK). Our priority has been to create a lean process with few barriers to keeping it fresh. That has been easy with only two editors, but as the team grows we will need to introduce some checks and balances, hopefully in a way that doesn't slow us down.
A lot of great information & ideas have been shared in the agenda discussion document and on the User Guide Channel in Global Slack. I have tried to consolidate the top level discussion points here, and focus on the questions we want to answer at the Global Gathering.
Global Gathering - Questions to Answer
CONTRIBUTE You can select or double click on any statement to add a comment. Please feel free to add your thoughts and ideas prior to our gathering, so we don't miss anything
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Team Structure
- Two team leads (or one plus backup person for resilience)
- One team member per instance (each with a backup person)
- Language vs Instance owners (French vs Canada)
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How to Onboard New Editors?
- Process documented somewhere (is Notion an option? elsewhere?)
- Each new person needs access to Gitbooks
- Screen share / video training?
- Emily & Louise to onboard Misra & Jess, and record
- Future goal to create video on-boarding support tools
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Do we need to formalise the updating process for editors?
- Goals
- Minimise steps and bottlenecks
- Prioritise ease of updating and keeping it fresh
- Document the process
- Small iterations (fixes as we go)
- Rewrites (shared)
- Software updates (shared)
- Eriol mentioned the DIAL grants to help with documentation (strategic / catalytic grant) which provide funds. (ie. hosting, creating content, archiving videos etc). Eriol's previous experience was that 200k + was made available to pay for various team members
- Outreachy (paid interns)
- Google Summer of Code
- Eriol mentioned a grant (that she will be applying for) to 'make something better for at-risk users'
- eg. Language groups (eg. Turkish instance)
- Accessibility and Reading Level
- eg. alt text, spacing (dyslexia), subtitles for videos etc
- Reading level (e.g. Year 7) to push for Plain English (could also help with translation ease). See Hemingway appĀ http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
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What is the process for updating after weekly releases?
- Frequency (not too soon after a release?)
- Allocation of tasks (on rotation)
- Process for the UG team to get notification of upcoming changes
- Idea: UG Pipe on GitHub for issues that need content update
- Document the process (see proposed example)
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How do we track what needs to be updated?
- Could we all add content tasks to a table here in Notion?
- I created an example here Content Tasks
- Can anyone add to it?
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How do we collect input to the UG from non-editors?
- A data entry form here in Notion?
- Would it populate the above table automatically?
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How do we deal with changes that are instance specific?
- Especially same language instances that share a single UG version
- Tabs per instance
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Integrating translations into the main document
- Rachel working on a new approach (to present to us?)
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How To Guides / FAQ
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Video content immersed throughout the document, plus a youtube channel for all the videos
Discussion / Questions that came up in first Sharing Global Support Session