Ive noticed over the ~2 years ive been contributing that we are big on collaboration but one thing I noticed was a slight lack in communication between the technical contributors and the non-technical contributers. Its not too bad but it could be a lot better in my opinion. Other than the report a bug option and the translate this application buttons in the help of most programs we dont advertise the areas that people could help out with.
Ubuntu documentation has loads of problems with lack of collaboration. The problems are very simple developers change stuff(as they should) but ubuntu documenters generally dont hear about the changes till late in the release because a lot of the writers are non-technical. GRUB 2 was introduced in karmic and it wasnt documented which got a few bug reports that could have been avoided with people testing earlier in the cycle and picking up on the mistake or the developer asking someone to document the changes.
Also in help and support we could have a make this page better button maybe. Id love if we could add a button to help and support to open empathy on #ubuntu on freenode so people can ask questions if they are really confused.
On a wider scale we need to have better QA involvement with the users at earlier stages in the release cycles. Also if people could help out with the testcases page and fill it with easy tests that people can do to test functionality of programs in the base install, this will help users by letting them know what to test and how to do it.
Does anyone else have any ideas to improve collaboration? I think that with some small improvements we can improve a lot.
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I think with the switch over to all packages in bzr, it will be easier to notify documentation writers of changes to the GUI and what not. That is how we do it in KDE. Though, I know the core documentation writers work closely with developers and follow the development, at least with Kubuntu, and I am sure Matt and team do the same on the Ubuntu side.
Well we do talk but its not as good as I think it could be. The problem is that its a very large amount of docs and some gets a little outdated after a few releases. Id like if devs went to a wiki and put in what needs to be looked at.