Helpful Help (was re: Future direction of Ubuntu Documentation/Meeting times)

[Matthew East]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 08:09 +0200, Sean Wheller wrote:
> On Friday 29 July 2005 21:11, Corey Burger wrote:
> > Now, the world is not going to end if our help mainpage doesn't
> > improve and I am not going to leave the docteam.
> 
> Corey, everyone agrees that the front page must change. the question is, "To 
> what?"
> 
> Matthew (PT) and yourself have a vision, but it is not shared by all. Others 
> would like to be given the opportunity to contribute but feel they are not 
> being allowed.

This thread is a good place to start: had the reaction to it not been so
violent, we could have got right down to it and started discussing the
proposal. I suggest we do so now.

> On Friday 29 July 2005 20:49, Matt Galvin wrote:
> > > On 7/29/05, Sean Wheller <sean at inwords.co.za> wrote:
> > > > On Friday 29 July 2005 05:15, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I would give a +1 to your idea on getting a central page to
> > > > display the rest of the documents.
> > >
> > > yes I agree +1
> >
> > +1

I also agree of course that our index needs improving. However I also
believe that it is worth discussing Matthew PT's proposal in more detail
here. To be honest, we haven't had a detailed explanation of the
proposal itself, and I am personally very attracted to the idea of a
simple first time help that users can access via one click (or possibly
without any clicking the first time they install Ubuntu), and would like
to hear more. Especially I'm interested in how the existing
documentation fits into the proposal. One idea might be to go down the
line of Rob's improved frontpage of yelp, with an index of the documents
and a simple explanation of what they are, but have a separate first
time guide which opens after Ubuntu is installed, and which is listed in
that index in case users want to have a second look at it.

Matt
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