[Typo3-doc] Greetings from the US

[Alex Heizer]

Hello,

I have just joined this list and wanted to introduce myself. I am 
working with the US T3 marketing group to help review the manuals and 
other documents located on typo3.com/org to refine the English 
translations so that they can be better used to help market T3 to the 
United States market. There's been a lot of activity over the past few 
days on the TYPO3 US mailing list about a lot of things, and a lot of 
great energy helping to push us forward. One of the things that prompted 
us to begin reviewing the English versions of the documentation is that 
some people saw minor inconsistencies (such as spelling or grammatical 
errors) in these docs as a barrier for T3 acceptance in the US. Since 
these are not "our" documents, I wanted to introduce myself so that I 
could help both of our efforts to grow T3's use globally, and also in 
the US. I also wanted to get some information about what is going on in 
the main doc team, since my goal in reviewing the docs is to support 
your efforts, not create a separate team.

As I said, this idea has taken what shape it has over the past few days, 
and I wanted to keep you updated during its infancy. But what I can see 
happening is something like this:
1. Our team (myself and one other, at this point) take the existing 
documentation a piece at a time, based on popularity and suggestions 
from the US marketing list, the core doc team, the English mailing list, 
extension developers, and whoever else contacts us.
2. Review the English version, and correct any spelling and grammar 
errors, from the perspective of marketing to the US market. For example, 
'colour' and 'color' are both acceptable English spellings, but 'color' 
is the US spelling. We would also correct obvious typographical errors, 
such as transposed letters, etc., but not "rewrite" any documentation 
aside from putting the existing nouns, adjectives, subjects and objects 
into their correct English grammatical places.
3. Create a repository to store the US-English versions on the typo3.us 
website for one of two possible main reasons:
    a. To offer them as documentation for the US market (not preferable 
to us)
    b. To provide a staging area for our reviews so they can be 
published on the main typo3.com/org websites (very preferable to us. I 
will go on this premise for the sake of this tentative plan)
4. Maintain a "merge" system whereby any changes to an extension can be 
forwarded to us, merged, and then restaged back to whatever repository 
it will reside in.

As I said, this is what I came up with over the past few days, and am 
very open to our options as far as workflow and structure and am still 
feeling it out on our end. My main concerns are simply: there has been a 
lot of work done to date, there is currently a lot of work that 
continues to be done, there is already a main core documentation group, 
that group has an existing structure and workflow, and the US market 
needs documentation to be tailored in order to help us grow market 
share. I don't believe it would be wise to have a separate group, but 
would like to be able to facilitate the passage of information and 
documentation between the US market and what is already in place in the 
core team. An extension group would perhaps be a better description, to 
facilitate a specific action for a specific subset of our audience 
without burdening the entire documentation effort.

If anyone has any suggestions, questions, comments, advice, etc., please 
feel free to respond.

Regards,

Alex Heizer
USA