Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Re: LO white paper

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com> wrote:
> I see more a problem with making workflows different from one section to
> another (design, documentation, marketing) which may add confusion for those
> of us who help out in more than one area. I see this as just one more hurdle
> to getting people to work in a consistent manner.

I'm not really familiar with the workflows for Design, Documentation,
and Marketing. I'm pretty sure that Documentation uses a completely
separate ODFAuthors site, so their workflow is very different from
that of many of our other LibreOffice teams.

> Perhaps, a better idea would be to get the leads in design, documentation
> and marketing to decide on a process and then all follow the same. This will
> make it easier for our volunteers to work in more than one area without
> having to spend time learning how different one group works from another.

I'm not quite sure who those leads are, but I'd love to have more
standardization and organization between teams. I've been trying to
trumpet that cause for a while, and I'll gladly rally QA and the
Website team to join in on such meetings if you can get Design,
Documentation, and Marketing on board.

> We are still struggling with trying to engage users to volunteer in the
> project, while at the same time, not being clear right from the start as to
> how a volunteer is expected to contribute. Adding to the mix, it now means
> that a volunteer needs to master the use of OwnCloud and the wiki.

To upload files, one needs to be able to use ownCloud and/or the wiki,
yes, but I don't think it's that much work to learn how to use them.
If it isn't clear, then we should work on our documentation for those
tools.

> I am not quite clear on the problem of uploading more than one file at a
> time, when a search for a wikimedia extensions shows that there is one
> available[1] for installation. As for the size of uploaded files, this is
> usually set in the configuration file. As for the preview of images, I am
> not sure I understand the problem as being flakey.

The feedback I got from infra was that they would prefer to not have
many larger files (> 5-10MB) in the wiki. Additionally, we encountered
problems with images of that size and image previews in the wiki.

> I agree that uploading a 100-200 megabyte file would be a problem, but,
> these types of files would surely fall into a very clear minority of files.

Indeed. But the filesize limit is 25MB right now, and files even half
that size are (AFAIK) not encouraged, so I think we're talking about a
much larger set of files.

> IMO, we need to make the system as easy as possible to attract, engage and
> keep our volunteers. Adding to the mix, to me, sounds a little too
> frustrating of an event for new volunteers. If we are looking for people who
> have a little time to spend helping, well, they may end up spending all of
> their time trying to figure out our work habits and not staying.

I think our primary issue right now is lack of clear documentation. QA
struggles with complicated documentation and unclear software
interfaces, and while we're making good progress on improving both our
documentation and our tools, it's a long process for us. I'm sure
that's an issue all of our teams are facing.

I'm working on ownCloud documentation here, if anyone would like to
help me improve and expand our information:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/ownCloud

The WebDAV interface in particular is very slick on GNU/Linux -- you
can just connect via your GUI shell and upload/download files via
drag-and-drop as if they were on your local file system:
http://doc.owncloud.org/server/6.0/user_manual/files/files.html

Cheers,
--R

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