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NAME

docs-team-charter - Perl Documentation Team Charter

SUMMARY

This is the founding charter for the Perl Documentation Team.

The Perl project has a documentation sub-project, responsible for maintaining the quality and consistency of Perl's core documentation.

This project is managed by the Documentation Team (a.k.a. "Docs Team").

Mission and Duties

Mission statement

The Perl Documentation Team oversees the quality, accessibility, and maintainability of Perl's core documentation.

The mission in-depth

A few definitions of terms appearing in the mission statement:

Perl's core documentation

By "core documentation", we mean all the documentation that ships with Perl itself: stand-alone documents, function reference sections, and documentation attached to standard modules.

Even though much of that standard module documentation doesn't exist within Perl's core source distribution, the Docs Team still monitors their state on CPAN, and actively makes recommendations to improve them as needed.

Quality

The obvious job. The Docs Team is responsible for the core docs staying up-to-date, consistently readable, and correct.

Accessibility

The Docs Team makes sure that Perl's core docs are discoverable and navigable by all the language's users, new and old, across all relevant media. This includes the web.

Maintainability

The Docs team treats the core docs as a proper FOSS concern, within the larger Perl project.

This includes enthusiastically welcoming patches from the community, and making it easy for any interested reader to discover how they can contribute to the documentation project. It also includes working with Core Team to make sure that docs stay synchronized with new Perl releases.

Duties

  • Actively reviewing and improving Perl's existing collection of core documentation. This includes revising this documentation as needed for the sake of style, consistency, and modern best practices.

  • Assisting Perl contributors in making sure that any core documentation they add or update adheres to established standards.

  • Encouraging the community to contribute to Perl's documentation, making the process of submitting contributions clear and rewarding.

  • Fostering projects to improve the accessibility of Perl's core documentation, across various media.

Personnel

The Docs Team consists of one manager and any number of other volunteers.

The Docs Team manager is appointed by the Perl Steering Council, and may be removed or replaced by them as well.

Both the manager and the Steering Council may add volunteers to or remove volunteers from the Docs Team.

Resources

Mailing list

The Docs Team will maintain a publicly-archived mailing list for discussion of its work. The mailing list will be the medium of record for recording team plans and decisions. It must be possible for the Steering Council to transfer the rights to the list when a change in Docs Team management occurs.

The current mailing list can be found at to be determined.

Real-time chat

The team also collaborates on the #docs channel on irc.perl.org. The manager may migrate this to other chat systems in the future at their own discretion.

Funding

When appropriate, the team will seek funding for specific projects or materials via grants from The Perl Foundation or similar sources, just as with any other Perl infrastructure project. All Docs Team members otherwise serve on a volunteer basis.