Xen Project Document Days

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Revision as of 13:10, 15 July 2014 by Rcpavlicek (talk | contribs)
Icon Info.png Wednesday, July 30 is the next Document Day!

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Information about Document Days
Next dates
  • July 30, 2014
  • August 27, 2014
  • September 24, 2014
  • October 29, 2014
  • December 10, 2014
More Information
IRC
  • Freenode channel #xendocs
  • Turn up
  • Work on documentation
  • Have fun!

What is a Xen Project Document Day?

Xen Project document days are all day IRC events, facilitated by members of the Xen Project community. The purpose of Xen Project Document Days is to

  • Improve user documentation
  • Improve developer documentation, including the creation of man pages, etc.
  • Improve and maintaining the wiki: this means fixing important pages, retiring old ones, help identify what is and isn’t important, write new pages, etc.

How Does it Work?

  • Request to be a Wiki editor
  • Join us on IRC: freenode channel #xendocs
  • Tell people what you intend to work on (to avoid doing something somebody else is already working on)
  • Fix some documentation
  • Help others
  • And above all: have fun!

Other ways to Help

Let us know if you struggled with some content, if something is missing, can be improved and you do not feel sure enough to make changes to a page. The way to do this is by making a comment on talk pages. Every wiki page has an associated talk page which can be used for discussion and communicating with other users. Talk pages can be accessed by clicking the “discussion” tab at the top of the page. Simply edit the page as normal to add your comment, following the conventions outlined in Help:Talk Pages.

Stats

  • Xen_Document_Days/Acknowledgements/Jan2013: We changed >11K words on the wiki in more than 126 changesets. Changes to xen.org static pages were made. More than 25 people participated on IRC, and we had vibrant discussions on how to change navigation and other items, which led to new sections in the TODO list, e.g. Mediwiki Issues and XCP : Open work items
  • July 2012: We changed approximately 5K words in more than 100 changesets on the wiki and much more in xen-unstable (see here)
  • June 2012: Thank you for all the contributions. On the Xen wiki we changed approximately 11K words in more than 200 changesets. More details here.

Lessons learned:

  • More up-front coordination on the mailing list a week before the document day helps

Initial proposed dates for 2014

In 2013, we agreed on the mailing list that Xen Project Document days will be held the last Monday of each month. If the date clashes with say a major Xen Project event or a holiday, we will try and find an alternative date.

Following this rule, the initial 2014 dates were:

  • January 27, 2014
  • February 24, 2014
  • March 31, 2014

In March 2014, it became clear that Mondays are problematic to many. Multiple countries have Monday holidays, a number of people's schedules are difficult on Mondays, etc. So, in April, we tried the last Wednesday of the month.

As the Wednesday test was successful in April, we are now proposing dates of:

  • April 30, 2014
  • May 28, 2014
  • June 25, 2014
  • July 30, 2014
  • August 27, 2014
  • September 24, 2014
  • October 29, 2014
  • December 10, 2014 (due to holiday schedules in November and December)

Extra Days

Some community members indicated that they would like an extra doc day on a public holiday or weekend. We are looking for proposed dates. Please add dates below and sign up besides it. If we get more than 5 people signed up, we should hold a day on a weekend.