plasma documentation writing, friday and saturday

When we were kids we'd play this fun little game called "dog pile". The idea was simple: everyone jumped on top of one person creating a big pile of bodies. The idea was to avoid being the person at the bottom and/or from being suffocated if you were. Ah, such fond memories of struggling for breath beneath the crushing weight of a pile of fellow children.

This wonderful childhood game lives on in the phrase "to dog-pile on something", meaning that you pick a target and everyone leaps onto it. In the age of online social networking this has become a rather common way of doing things. (For better and for worse. :)

In Plasmaland, we often dog-pile on a specific problem with everyone leaping bodily onto the task until there is no more task to be had. Making all of our Plasmoids implement configChanged() was done this way, for instance, with great success. It's fast, efficient and injects some urgency and fun into the mix. Much nicer than working alone on implementing the same thing 50 times over. ;)

Dog-piling is not just for coding, though. We can also use it for documentation writing. So I'd like to invite you, dear read, to join us in a Documentation Dog Pile. The goal will be to document as many aspects of Plasma Desktop and the Plasmoids (which, incidentally, is going to be the name of my next 50's tribute rock band) as we can on Userbase. Just look at how awesome such documentation can look!

I will be hosting this dog-pile-on-the-docs Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th starting at 15:00 UTC both days on irc.freenode.net in #kde-docs. Given that I'm in UTC-7, this means I'll be rising very bloody early, but I love you people who live in my perpetual future so much that that is what I'm going to do. We'll go until nobody is left. :)

How will it work? Each attendee can pick the Plasmoid or aspect of Plasma Desktop of their choice, announce their intentions in the irc channel and then start writing about it. You'll have the support of KDE people to answers technical questions, proof-read and help with wiki-fu as needed. Personally, I'll be working on documenting the new Activies features and user interface.

You don't need to be an excellent writer or a master of the written English word. You just need to have the desire to help out and be willing to write your best. We'll have our team of ravishing editors (you didn't know we had such a team, did you?) descend upon the efforts and fix up whatever needs to be fixed.

If you are more interested in writing in your native language, we also need all the existing documentation translated, and so you too can join us and do some writing.

When it's all over, I'll post the results here in my blog. Let's make those results fantastic! To sum up:

• What: Plasma documentation dog-pile!


• When: this Friday and Saturday


• Where: irc.freenode.net in #kde-docs


• What To Bring: Your installation of Plasma Desktop and/or Netbook, your enthusiasm, a keyboard, an irc client such as Konversation or Quassel and a web browser pointed at userbase


• The Goal: Terrific documentation for Plasma, and a lot of fun in the process!

See you there!