In the past few weeks I have been building myself up to get back on track with my role as Doc Lead in the Drupal community. I’ve been off radar for quite a while now (since last fall) and I’m finally getting my feet under me to tackle the work of docs again. In the time that I was out of it though, it was too obvious that there needed to be some changes in how I (and the Drupal community) approach this whole documentation team thing. There were a few other people out there who had expressed the same concerns to me and so I sat down with them to kick around what we need to change. We came up with two fundamental shifts in how we do things as a team: communication and coordination. I think this will take a lot of pressure off of a number of people, myself included, as well as let the community take even more ownership of documentation and play a role in the steering of the ship, even if the captain sometimes goes AWOL.
There is a post up on the Documentation Team group page which goes into the details about changing our main form of communication (focused on that very group) and the new concept of coordinators for the team. Time to spread the love and put some names and faces to the people who are doing the work. Hopefully this will also create more points of contact for folks who want to get involved but just aren’t sure where to go or who to talk to. So if you want to share in the work and make some connections to help you on that road, come play with us over at groups.drupal.org and the issue queue. We have lots of good stuff to get going.
Speaking of good stuff, we also sat down and got ourselves refocused on the big monster goals that really require team effort to pull off. We have cleaned up our Community Initiatives section a bit to make it clearer that our current big project is getting the Drupal 7 documentation up to snuff for a great release. Once we mop up Drupal 7 work, we will begin to focus on creating a new, better home for our docs on a new sub-site in the drupal.org family. That project presents some wonderful opportunities but also a tremendous effort with many moving pieces. So, for now, we really need to get Drupal 7 rockin’ out the door before we begin the long haul of a new doc home. Please feel free to dig in the Drupal 7 project or if you have a burning desire to work on an initiative of your own, let us know on the Documentation Team group page.
Big thanks to Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) for hosting our little powwow out in her home in Seattle, as well as Lee Hunter (LeeHunter) for taking his weekend to fly out to the west coast so we could all sit down and sort some of this out.
RockTreeSky 