Meeting users where they are
With both a two-day conference and a three-day sprint, the Open Help Conference made for a busy week, but I must say that it was a success. We had people there from Gnome, Mozilla, OpenStack, Red Hat, BSD, as well as people who were interested in learning about open-source help. Everyone had something to share. [...]
Open Help Conference, 2011
I’m in Cincinnati in advance of the Open Help Conference, an event organized around open source docs, and the building of community documentation efforts in commercial projects. The conference will kick-off this evening with a social event, and will continue (with both the conference and post-conference docs hackfests) through Wednesday. The event has some great [...]
Docs Team meeting – Sunday, May 29th – 20:00 UTC
Just a quick note to let people know that we’re holding an Ubuntu Documentation Team meeting tomorrow, Sunday, May 29th, at 20:00 UTC. When is 20:00 UTC? Here is how to figure it out: It’s easy (Yes, step one is, “It’s easy.”) Click on this fancy link. Look through the list of cities and find [...]
My UDS in photos
Here’s a few pictures from UDS: Saying goodbye to Matt Zimmerman at the UDS opening keynote. It took me until Friday to thank Matt for his advocacy around women’s issues, as well as LGBT and gender issues. There aren’t many people in positions such as his who do so, so many thanks, Matt. Best of [...]
Ubuntu documentation at UDS: A summary
Now that my week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit is over, and I have completed my safe flight back, I thought I would write up a blog post about my experience while I complete my recovery from jet lag. My week at UDS was a challenging week. A great week. A week in which I [...]
Help for Ubuntu 11.04 – We are working on it
Trying to write documentation for both Gnome 3 and Ubuntu 11.04 had many of the documentation contributors a bit strapped for time, but we are making progress on user help for 11.04. Here is a quick peek at what we are doing: Click to play This is all done with Mallard and Yelp. KDE, you [...]
Gnome 3 documentation hackfest
Although I’ve primarily worked on Xubuntu documentation in the past, this cycle has seen me contribute quite a bit to gedit documentation. Unfortunately, I’ve asked, and the gedit team isn’t going to be making an additional release for the 2.3x branch, so these updates won’t be included in Ubuntu 11.04. : / Update: I’ve spoken [...]
Qt in the land of Gnome-based desktops: The issue of copyright in Free software
Recently Mark Shuttleworth wrote about how Qt will become part of the Ubuntu 11.10 desktop, and that Qt-based apps will eventually be considered as possible default Ubuntu apps. Obviously, this would be a big change from using GTK-only applications (that is, aside from Firefox and Open/Libreoffice applications), but Mark encourages GNOME developers to consider using [...]
RelaxNG, Entities, and Namespaces
I ran into a couple of roadblocks in trying to use entities with Mallard recently, and thought I would share how I worked around them in case anyone else needed to do the same thing. Although my examples deal with Mallard, what I note here will also work for entities in DocBook 5 documents, or [...]
Flourish Open Source Conference – Call for Speakers
The University of Illinois at Chicago is once again planning to host their Flourish Open Source conference, and have put out a call for speakers. The event will be held April 1-3, 2011, on the university’s campus on the near Northwest side of Chicago. Though the conference is run by student volunteers, you wouldn’t know [...]
