[Installation Guide] Call for contributors

[Jim Campbell]

Hi All,

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 5:20 PM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi guys,
>
> I've put up a list of the roles available in the Installation Guide
> team, and what I think their responsibilities should be:
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/KarmicInstallationGuide/TeamRoles
>
> If you'd like to take on one of these roles, please reply to this post
> with a short justification for why you think you'd be the best person
> for the job.

I would like to apply for the role of Technical Reviewer for this
particular project. I had discussed this project a bit during the
Writing Open Source conference, and think that because this particular
will be a new, stand-alone document that it will be a great
opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of single-sourcing our
documentation.

Single-sourcing documentation provides the potential for one set of
documentation to be used in a variety of contexts, output for
different audiences (kubuntu, ubuntu, and xubuntu... plus, beginner /
advanced, alternate-installer / live-cd, etc.), and output formats.
Although I think we could set reasonable single-sourcing goals for our
initial versions of this document, architecting our initial versions
well would give us the option to make use of more complex
single-sourcing approaches in later versions.

While single-sourcing has its advantages, one disadvantage of
single-sourcing documentation is that it requires a bit more planning
and careful authoring than non-single-sourced documentation. With that
in mind, I think I would be able to better serve the project by making
sure that content written by others is well-configured to be
single-sourced.

In terms of experience, I have edited and composed Xubuntu
documentation for two prior releases. This involved editing and
creating content, troubleshooting xml-related problems, and working
with the doc-team tool chain.  I have also attended two user
assistance conferences this year to get myself up to speed on UA
best-practices, and am eager to apply them to our projects.  I also
have a degree in Communication, and was a four-year member of my
university's speech team, so I am able to write concisely in a variety
of styles.

Jim