mozilla.org Documentation Roadmap
This documentation roadmap is the master plan for future mozilla.org documentation efforts. This plan outlines our objectives, schedule, priorities, and management process for documentation of the Mozilla software and related tools.
John Keiser's Developer Documentation Roadmap
Mission
Problem: The problem with our documentation is practically no one is doing it. The mozilla.org community is so disorganized and unfriendly that potential contributors either do not know where to start or are intimidated to do anything. Unfortunately, the problem will not be resolved soon since no person has a clear idea of what should be done.
Philosophy: The goal of this plan is to kick start documentation efforts as quickly as possible. We will therefore minimize the amount of documentation and discussion needed. The philsophy we adapt will be:
Keep It Simple. Keep It Small.
Tasks: Our two main tasks will be creating a document catalogue for documentation tracking and practicing a write-often-publish-often documentation process.
The catalogue will be used as a central document index useful for the next documentation roadmap review. It will not use for any other purpose, such as as tracking links, review status, and progresses, priorizing documentation bugs, and maintain a to-do list or a contributor list.
The write-often-publish-often process will not be documented in form of procedure, policy, or guidelines, except as described in this roadmap. The process is simply a hand-on approach which eliminates any purposeful leadership, management, or plan.
We will not establish any management structure, change current style guides, review or write documentation policies or procedures, write any further documentation on documentation, implement any new technology for document management, reorganize document organization, merge Mozilla Zope and mozilla.org contents, or implement any grand plan for reviewing and updating existing documents. All of these tasks, while important, will wait at least until the next road map review.
Documentation Catalogue
We already have a cataloguethe documentation status table. All we need is updating and maintaining it.
A Plan-less, Pain-less Process Approach
We will not pursue any general plan. Instead, we will work on the basis of small, focused projects.
There will be no timeline; what time elaspsed will be the timeline. And there will be no plan; what we do will be the plan. The idea is to eliminate any purposeful management and concentrate on the works at hand. The main assumption, and the objective, of this approach is that, while doing documentation, people will pick up from others what they consider good documentation practices. In the end, successful projectss will emerge as exampla that inspire copycat practices. Instead of writing procedures and policies (which no one reads), we will affect people simply by doing it.
On the organizational level, this means that, instead of trying to introduce new ideas to many project teams, we will focus on small projects and project members will naturally carry over what they have learned to other projects.
On the work level, this means that, instead of writing big documents from the begining, we will release small pieces of works as notes as soon as they are done and organize them into subject documents when we have enough notes.
Timeline
This plan is scheduled to be reviewed on ??date??.
Project Management
No management roles will be assigned. The only planned management processes are carrying out this roadmap and roadmap review. The review process will be as followed:
- Assign a contact person for the review. The person will announce project review in the mailing list and ask for comments.
- Review the documentation workflow (need-write-format-review-publish-maintain). Determine the constraining factor preventing us from generating more documents than what we have done (that is, the one or two process links or steps that can be improved to give the maximum organizational benifit). Discuss and identify the root problem(s), and propose resolutions.
- Review the catalogue and the roadmap. Have the objectives of the roadmap been fulfilled? If yes, propose new objectives. The objectives should be related to the previous step.
- From the Documentation QA Process Flowchart, construct a dependency map (or tree) of the proposed resolutions and the QA process. Review and change the resolutions to prevent possible negative impacts.
- Review the quality assurance procedures. Re-write the procedures to reflect any process change.
- Review the catalogue. Determine what articles and FAQs need to be written, updated, splitted, or trashed. Identify what notes can be assembled into topical articles. Create a prioritized to-do list. Re-catagorize documents if neccessary.
- Create a new roadmap. Pass the roadmap around for voting to be accepted or rejected.
- Review the style guides and templates.
- Review the license(s).
- Implement the roadmap.
The following people have been nominated as top roadmap reviewers:
- ????
How About Zope?
The future of Mozilla Zope is a mystry.