nextcloud / nextcloud/documentation

Improving community documentation for non-enterprise users

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Description

I've noticed that current documentation puts burden on employees and contributers in that:

  • Certain articles must be withheld for clients, especially enterprise. This is understandable.
  • Documentation is managed through github, which means each edit must be approved by employees.
  • There is no clear community documentation available outside of either company maintained documentation or within the forum at https://help.nextcloud.com, with the closest thing to community docs being a howto section, which is restricted to contributions to longer term users. For whatever reason it doesn't feel the same as a normal documentation site, both in presentation and use...
  • The process of tracking and reporting to Github is awesome to offer to the wider community, but it isn't the same as clear documentation. As-is, it requires a lot of on-boarding on the part of the user as the gradually learn where to look for which app/server/client/etc.

I think it is worth considering how to improve documentation for small installations. Let me totally rephrase this request:

Is there a way to improve documentation, while lowering employee overhead, so that small user admins experimenting with things like clustering and multi-server setups can write up documentation together without stepping on your existing enterprise support? This isn't related to any interest in large scale deployments, but the existing documentation is notably missing articles which would help the casual admin. For a reference, I want to encourage you to look at Ubuntu, which has official documentation from Canonical, but even more importantly they offer absolutely rich community docs outside of the "official" docs. Arch Wiki is not a company, but I love how it answers all casual admin questions you would otherwise need to post to a forum about, so I love the thought of finding something closer to this in regards to answering common Nextcloud questions. Cheers.

Thanks for any consideration and thoughtful discussion.

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First steps

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Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by reviewing the existing company-maintained documentation and the help.nextcloud.com howto section, then identify gaps affecting small installations. Done would require an agreed, concrete documentation approach rather than only a general proposal.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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