For the last few months myself and quite a few community members have been working on a larger vision for our beloved Drupal documentation. It has taken quite a bit longer than I had hoped, but I want to put out a draft of an initial "roadmap" for documentation that outlines our bigger issues and an approach to tackling them. I've attached a document which has everything we've hammered out so far in a 10 page document along with three appendices. This post is just a short summary of what is in that document and to let people know that we are gearing up to kick things off and really make Drupal documentation rock.

For starters, we've spent a lot of time identifying problem areas, prioritizing them and setting out some target dates. When looking at the tasks we need to accomplish we recognized that there are two main areas to focus on: the documentation itself and the community of people that create and maintain it.

Two main projects

The most important thing to put our energy into right now is to redefine the information architecture of our docs so that they are more usable. To that end, we are fortunate that Becca Scollan, who did the University of Baltimore usability testing, has offered her services to take on this crucial task. Becca will be leading the charge in this effort and we will be looking for help from all areas of the Drupal community to provide information, legwork and feedback to drive it forward. In the next few weeks we will be launching a "stakeholder interview" process where we will need community members to interview each other about their experiences with documentation. We'll add more information about this to the Content architecture section of the Community initiatives Docs roadmap.

The other initiative we are starting today is to improve the recognition of documentation efforts and find out better ways to communicate with and support people who want to help. There is a short survey posted at http://docs.drupaltest.org that we'd love to have everyone fill out so we can start important conversations about how to recognize the people behind the docs.

Communication

Speaking of conversations, this isn't something that can be successfully pushed forward by just a handful of people. The documentation is a community resource and we all owe it to ourselves to invest in making it better. Everyone is encouraged to be part of this process. make your voice be heard and get your ideas out there. The main channels for communication we will be using are those that are familiar to our community. We will use the documentation mailing list for discussions and hashing out plans, while we use the documentation issue queue for our tasks. To have a central place to organize some of these tasks, we will make use of the Community initiatives section of Drupal.org, much like Drupal core has. There is a Documentation roadmap section where we can create "landing" pages for folks interested in working on particular areas.

There is an IRC meeting in #drupal-docs on the Freenode network scheduled for Tuesday, June 16 at 17:00 GMT 18:00 GMT (darn it, sorry, this should be 18, not 17). The meeting will be an open time to discuss the roadmap, ask questions and start organizing things. Feel free to drop by and join the conversation.

We will make announcements about new work and calls for help on the mailing list and on the Documentation team group page, which you can follow with RSS. Please join in and be part of making Drupal documentation the best it can be and serve all of us better.

AttachmentSize docsroadmap-final.pdf317.39 KB roadmap-AppendixA-docs-tasks.pdf153.15 KB roadmap-AppendixB-outreach-tasks.pdf151.27 KB AppendixC-drupaldocs-mindmap.pdf654.14 KB