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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] Marketing and documentation (was Re: planet.gnome.org)
From:       Tom Chance <tom () acrewoods ! net>
Date:       2006-02-15 9:45:29
Message-ID: 200602150945.29974.tom () acrewoods ! net
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On Wednesday 15 February 2006 09:05, Birger Kollstrand wrote:
> Wednesday 15 February 2006 07:13, skrev Aaron J. Seigo:
> > On Wednesday 04 January 2006 20:33, Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:33:38 +0100 wrote:
> > > I think that the current way of documenting software in the
> > > open source world is just outdated - and documentation is
> > > definitively one of the weakest points of open source. We
> > 
> > i don't think it's a technology problem, however. we don't promote
> > documentation writers nor the act of writing documentation well; we don't
> > build community around documentation writing; we don't make it easy to
> > write *effective* documentation; we don't reach out to professional
> > technical writers.
> 
> So, what is the promo issue in this?
> 
> 1. Do we need a marketing campagin to attract writers?

Yes, but there are two problems:

1) How many good writers are there out there who would be interested in 
writing documentation for KDE and who have heard of KDE? As with promo stuff 
part of our problem is that many of the people with the right skills and the 
right mindset to be able to write good docs (as opposed to ones tailored to 
developers) have never heard of KDE and would most likely not get 
involved :-) We're targetting a fairly small bunch of people.

2) How do we promote it to that small group? We ran a competition at aKademy 
2004 for the user guide that was pretty successful. We aren't going to get a 
lot of coverage outside the uber-geeky media without a pretty compelling 
story. Even if we did reach people we'd need to be able to promote a decent 
solution for writing and collecting docs and we don't have that yet.

But also have a look at the articles in magazines like TuxMagazine and the 
more user-oriented Linux magazines. Search the web for HOWTOs on 
applications, for promotional articles on particular applications. These 
fulfil some of the tasks of documentation and take almost no effort on our 
part. One way to go might be to collect the best articles, either as links to 
online versions or to try and get permission to reproduce them. We can also 
encourage more to be written with general promotion work.


> 2. Do we need to promote som issues towards the coders?

Not sure :-)


> 3. Do we need to promote a new way of writing the documentation?

New tools - yes. New kinds of documentation - well the user guide was a really 
positive step in the right direction, and my article point links in with it.


At the end of the day it is a very difficult issue, as you say, because we're 
promoting this message: "hey, come and spend lots of time writing relatively 
dull documents read by a handful of people, and you'll get very little karma 
in the community for doing it compared to the whizz-kid hackers on amaroK and 
Plasma". Addressing those issues - time, dull, karma - would be a good start.

Regards,
Tom

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