Activities/Help

Goals of the Help Activity

Provide users with easy access to documentation and manuals
Let people understand that Sugar is a Community Project and that we would like their help
Invite users to join the community by asking a question
Make visible the fact that we are real people

User Experience

I am hoping our design people will help here. I think it should be a blurb about being a community project, invitation to ask a question and a link to the manual in a reader.

This is great stuff that belongs on the Browse home page in a Getting help section. If the home page were generated (as it was in OLPC releases see ticket #574) then it could detect if the Help content is installed and link to it as well as online doc) You can also also add the first two items to the Sugar/8_4 introductory section at http://flossmanuals.net. -- Skierpage 21:37, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Specific tasks we should be sure to cover

providing information how to setup network --> just explaning to go to F1 and to click on the essid
function buttons F1-4 => minimal information about views world,group,me,journal/activities,
how to set language => short cut to setting menu.

Asking a Question

We don't have a email client so we'll need people to ask a question on a web page. We'll need to explain to them that they can't use it if they are offline.

We should ask for the email address so we can answer them.

For a first iteration questions will be directed to IAEP and community members will be asked to reply. Replying with a link to an FAQ or Wiki page with an answer is to be encouraged.

If we get into any sort of dialog with the question we should invite them to subscribe to IAEP and to help the community.

Sept '09 - We are now moving toward Launchpad for questions so we could potentially direct people to that website.

Nice to Have Features

Look up what version of Sugar they are running and point them to the appropriate manual for that version.
If the Browse activity's home page were part of Sugar then it could link to the appropriate local file:// and/or online URLs. This home page could either be static and updated with each Sugar release; or it could dynamically built from a template as it was in the OLPC OS releases, and detect if the user has local help pages. You can also detect in JavaScript if a local file:// URL exists, here's some code. -- Skierpage 04:53, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Next Steps

Put the content of the help activity into a form that can be managed with version control so we can make different versions for the XO and SoaS and potentially let deployments customize it. - ticket #885
The content is currently managed on http://flossmanuals.net , which uses TWiki for editing and version history. You can go to http://en.flossmanuals.net/remix and make a Sugar 0.84 manual from the Sugar/8_4 manual items. I believe this is how someone (Sj?) loaded the HTML into http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/help/repos/mainline/trees/master/help -- Skierpage 05:21, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Resources

OLPC:release 8.2.0 ships with the olpc:Help activity. This is a dedicated browser that shows pages describing the XO-1 laptop and its software including Sugar version 0.82. This activity is hosted at http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/help and its material comes from community editing at http://flossmanuals.net.

Trac Tickets: OLPC
French version Helpfr, Activities/Helpfr in Sugar 0.84