At the Fedora Linux 38 release party, the Docs team suggested that we take advantage of a virtual meetup to bring teamwork into documentation writing. Documentation writing shouldn’t be a solitary pursuit.
An interactive session at Flock 2023 helped exchange ideas on a collaborative way to run meetings and invite more contributions for documentation.
After months of waiting for ideas to be finalized, the Docs team is pleased to announce the workshop will begin September 2023.
If you fancy coming along, just let us know your preferred timeslot in the When-is-good scheduler by September 15 2023.
But why and how?
The idea behind a virtual writing session is to combine the power of the Fedora Podcast with advocacy of writing and maintaining excellent user documentation. Here is why.
- Documentation in any free and open source software project provides reasons for users and contributors to stay loyal to the project and software.
- The Docs workshop aims to facilitate individual and collaborative work through a supportive community of documentarians.
- Documentation is more than a fix of visual presentation. We’re writing, reviewing, and deploying docs.
- In accordance with the Fedora project motto “First”, we like to try new things in toolset, automation, and UI improvement.
Building on feedback from each session, the Docs team wants to empower people to learn about templates, issue tickets, review processes, and tool chains to improve documentation for Fedora Linux users and contributors.
Program agenda
A monthly agenda will be posted in Fedocal and Fosstodon (@fedora@fosstodon.org).
Track 1: Introduction and onboarding (odd months)
– What the Docs team is all about. What role will interest you?
– The types of user documentation Fedora Linux publishes
– How you can help improve Fedora Documentation.
Track 2: Skill-based workshop (even months)
– Technical review, Git workshop, AsciiDoc template and attributes
– Use of local build and preview script
– Test documentation quality
Format of Track 2
– Demo
– Try it yourself
– Q&A
If you come along to the Track 2 workshop, all you need is a Fedora account and Pagure account with your computer, preferably with Git and Podman (or Docker) installed.
In the meantime, if you have questions, feel free to drop by our Discussion forum. I’m looking forward to saying hello at our first virtual docs workshop someday in late September (the exact date depends on the when-is-good responses)! Let’s do it!
Leslie Satenstein, Montreal,Que
I would look forward to some YouTube videos as a set of lessons.
I tend to follow… “Learn LinuxTV” as an excellent producer of Linux Educational topics.
I think that a topic that introduces what College students would need (libreoffice, writer, spreadsheet,etc), along with pdf maker would be just great.
Hank Lee
Onboarding session is expected to be personalized topics. I’m afraid they are not the right content to be shared on video sharing platform. Track 2 might be recorded and shared publicly. I’m in discussion with co-host and Docs team about the practicalities. As a free and open source community, I recommend the content to be shared on FOSS platform when possible.
https://opensource.com/article/23/4/open-source-tools-virtual-conference
Both sessions will not be live-streamed. I could record the session with OBS Studio, edit footage with Kdenlive, and upload final cut to Peertube, not YouTube.
The workshop is aimed at those who want to be user documentation writers and reviewers for the Fedora Linux user documentation. We also look for UX/UI designers. I recommend web editors in Pagure and plain text editors as documented in the Docs contributor guides.
I can’t imagine this workshop is for libreoffice or other tools you mentioned. There are professionally curated video tutorials in Udemy or Coursera on libreoffice.
Hank Lee
You can watch ‘State of Docs’ presentation at the Fedora Linux 38 release party. The idea behind a virtual writing session started from there.
https://youtu.be/Rw3dfjB85YE?feature=shared
sofia adams
I am personally using Fres.co for my remote workshops. It is a mix between Virtual facilitation platforms and Virtual space tools. Everything is editable like you would in Google Slides
Hank Lee
Thanks for your suggestions. As an organizer of the virtual meeting, I have been testing Jitsi, Google Meet and Hopin. I got hands on with fres.co today.
I’ll discuss with co-hosts/organizer of the workshop on conference tool. We need to consider various user preference and devices users are connecting from.
I’ll share the meeting link and time on Fedocal (Fedora Calendar) on 15 September – https://calendar.fedoraproject.org/docs/
Hope to see you on the meeting!
Hank Lee
Docs team is pleased to announce the writing workshop (Track 1: Introduction and onboarding) will kickstart on 28 September 2023. We have two 30-minute sessions that should fit into most of timezones, so you can choose one.
Time and meeting link are updated in the Fedocal.
https://calendar.fedoraproject.org/docs/2023/9/28/