My Role ∞

I am the docs team leader.

The Documentation Team Leader for Unity Linux will be in charge of all documentation, internal communication, and public relations. He will ensure the various outlets are consistently written to, including various blogs, Twitter, all announcements and news, the wiki, mailing list, and buglist. He will correlate all activities between the Development Team and the community at large, as well as be willing to take up the responsibilities of any member who cannot complete a project.

A lot of my other interests will become secondary to the organizational responsibilities I’ve taken on.

Documentation ∞

I am am an admin on the wiki, and am a fearless editor and organizer.

DokuWiki is [was] the engine which runs the wiki. I make no apologies for openly hating it. I think it’s fundamentally inferior to MediaWiki. However, good documentation is less about the engine and more about the writing . I consider this a personal challenge. I’ll help make good docs in spite of DokuWiki. [grin]

Developer Liaison ∞

Basically I would lurk on the developer mailing list and anywhere else that’s good, and I would take notes.

I already do this to help update todo lists, so developers can mention interesting stuff and they can be reminded to follow up when they’re less busy.

But taking that a little further, I could also filter that knowledge out to the public. That’s something that’s desperately needed, since most projects are unintentionally opaque to everyday people.

This is a concept I like a lot, and I’m going to try it for a while. Maybe it’ll work out, maybe it won’t. In either case, I don’t intend to be irreplaceable in this activity, and I would end up wanting at least two other people occasionally helping out, so that any one of us could take a break. I’m big on redundancy.

Public Relations (PR) ∞

I like this idea much less than being a liaison. However, the idea is much the same, and I will probably end up helping out behind the scenes.

A PR person would have various external contacts with blogs, news outlets and whatnot. They would compile vastly more official and fancy notes than a developer liaison would.

There’s all kinds of messy social nonsense that I don’t want to get into, but this is also a important good role to be filled.

Blogging ∞

This is a personal blog, and everything I say is unofficial. However, I do share whatever I can whenever I can. This means that I’d almost certainly end up posting any liaison notes here as well as in any normal places – probably the forum, and who knows where else.

View my posts about Unity Linux.

Forum ∞

So far, everyone on the team is either a moderator or an admin on forum.unity-linux.org, including me.

I’m not so keen on forums, but I think I may get into the habit of extracting interesting stuff from the forum and updating the documentation and maybe also posting interesting tidbits here.

I have no interest in actual moderation. I already do that kind of thing on the wiki.

Other ∞

There is no real “head honcho”, “benevolent dictator” or the like, and there is no such thing as “the boys” or any other cliques. Redundancy with adminhood is pretty important, and so I happen also have the keys to some of the other locks – mailing list, probably some website-related stuff and who knows what else.

But since I have no particular interest in those things – unless some disaster strikes – then I’m neither active in those areas nor do I concern myself with how others may manage those things. This seems to be pretty much the case with everyone.

spiralofhope

My involvement with Unity Linux