Monday was the first (well, sort of) day at Railsconf Europe, and as such saw the first set of Birds of a Feather sessions. I attended one originally suggested by Jeremy McAnally (though he was unable to make it, unfortunately) on writing for Rails - documentation, blogging, books, and training, for example.
It ended up being a great session, with a couple of Brits, a Spaniard, a Belgian, an Aussie, a passel of Germans, and me - I was very excited to see the diverse interests that the various parties brought to the table. Several people were actively writing books, several were training others, and pretty much everyone bemoaned the current state of Rails documentation in their native languages.
That last point is where we spent the most time, actually - it turns out that the French- and Spanish-speaking communities don’t really have any Rails documentation at all. The Germans have a number of books (O’Reilly, etc.) translated from the English, but they’re apparently pretty low-quality translations - and no one has an internationalized version of the core API documentation, since it’s generated from RDoc on the Rails source.
We bandied about a number of ideas, including forming a Rails documentation core team (to relieve the burden from the framework core team) and separating the “official” documentation from the RDoc - much like the PHP documentation is. One person volunteered to start a Google group on the topic, so hopefully some good, focused efforts will come from the session (much like rubyforchange grew out of a BoF at the Ruby Hoedown).
So, if your native language is something other than English, keep a watch out for changes on the horizon. This might just be the next step to Rails taking over the world!
