Screencasts - teambuilding and documentation

[Ubuntu Clips]

On 12/20/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
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> To: Documentation team.
> CC: lots of other people.
>
> Alan Pope from the UK team is producing a few screencasts that I am
> interested in promoting in two specific ways.
>
>   http://quickones.org/
>
> First of all, beginning to build a team around these activities and
> beginning to "officialise" the project within the Ubuntu community. This
> will encourage contribution, and increase quality and visibility of
> these screencasts, allowing them to reach more people.
>
> Secondly, and more importantly from my perspective, beginning to
> incorporate these screencasts into the documentation. The way I think it
> would be great to do this is by providing some hosting for Alan's
> project on a semi-official Ubuntu domain (such as doc.ubuntu.com) and by
> inserting links to videos from the system and online documentation.
>
> A couple of very important points.
>
> First, these are *help* screencasts, i.e. they help the user to
> understand how to do a task, rather than being advocacy/marketing
> related (showing off Ubuntu, and so on). This email has nothing to do
> with the latter category.
>
> Secondly, I am acutely aware that there are some other projects out
> there doing similar stuff. ubuntuclips.org is a prominent one. Contact
> email addresses for the ones that I know of are CC:ed to this email.
> Obviously, absent any serious technical differences, it would be nice to
> have all these people working together. To enable this to happen of
> course, the relevant people need to get together and talk about some of
> the pros and cons of the different technical methods they are using, and
> reach a consensus about how to proceed to work together.
>
> So, if anyone is interested in working with Alan on this project, please
> reply to this email, or contact us in some other way. At the moment I
> very much see this project as one which falls under the wing of the
> Documentation Team. In time, hopefully it will flourish, and a separate
> team with separate tools may be required - for the moment let's discuss
> the project on the documentation team mailing list:
>
>   https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
> Thanks for reading, and I hope this project can take off nicely, get
> some good contributors, and most importantly reach and help many Ubuntu
> users.
>
> Matt
>

Hi Matt,

Sounds like a wonderful idea. Some initial thoughts:

It would be nice to have a "core" set of screencasts that complement the
existing core topics in the documentation. These could be created, updated,
and maintained in some sort of consistent and systematic way along with
release cycles and the rest of the documentation.

I think it would also be of great value to have community contributed
screencasts in the spirit of ubuntuclips and more generally in the spirit of
users helping users as with forums, wikis, etc.

Cheers,
Michael

-- 
ubuntuclips.org
video howtos for human beings
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