For over 20 years, the Ubuntu Linux desktop has been one of the most popular Linux distributions, and the gateway to Linux and open source for millions of users. Its success has always been due to a tight collaboration between the Ubuntu community and Canonical, and the documentation that accompanies each and every release.
The Ubuntu Desktop documentation, however, is showing signs of its age. Many users find that it’s spread across too many different locations. Topics can be difficult to find, difficult to follow, and sometimes out-of-date. To help solve these problems, Canonical is in the very early stages of prototyping a new platform that we hope will be the foundation for the Ubuntu Desktop documentation for the next 20 years, and beyond. This represents a wonderful and exciting opportunity for the Open Documentation Academy, both in supporting and following what should become a trailblazing documentation platform, and also in seeding a set of open source community documentation for the next generation of Ubuntu users.
To start with, several issues related to Desktop will be added to the Open Documentation Academy. You can think of them all as top-level guides, suitable for a beginner who is curious to know more, but also pointing at more technical content that an advanced user might pursue further (perhaps these are future tasks too). They’re broad because we want to invoke the more creative side of technical writing. Many of your readers will be ordinary users, and their skill levels (and patience) will vary hugely.
This is an excellent opportunity to get involved at the beginning of what we hope will be a major project to improve Desktop documentation in the coming years. The initial topics that we have selected will give you opportunities to stretch your writing muscles in new ways, often requiring you to connect ideas and explain them for the general user
To get started, just take a look for tasks with the ‘desktop’ label in our task tracker: