Dear QGIS community,

In the last few years we have been steadily improving the amount of funding we are able to accumulate in the QGIS project. Our goal in obtaining funding is always to ‘make QGIS better’. Up until now we have focussed funding on high profile aspects of the project: Funding regular hackfests, paying for bug fixing work prior to releases, funding infrastructure such as servers, domain name registrations etc.

With improved funding levels we now have the opportunity to also start addressing some of the many less obvious components of QGIS that badly need attention, but often don’t attract volunteers. In our PSC meetings it was agreed that we would start this initiative by funding one or more experienced users to improve the QGIS manual. Here, briefly, is the vision:

As an experienced QGIS user you currently have two main resources: The QGIS manual and the QGIS training manual. In this call we focus on the manual, which is already an excellent resource on available functionality in QGIS.

• The challenge is to keep it synchronised with all new features, and examples and figures often run the risk of being out of date. This is the case already for several chapters of the manual for the latest QGIS releases and we want to start optimizing this.

  We would love to see the QGIS manual providing a readable narrative explaining the purpose (with images and illustrations if needed) of each feature. It can also provide short sample snippet where useful, which in many cases you can simply cut and paste into your code and then tweak to get started.

  For this funded effort we are thus seeking one or more individuals to lay the foundation for this work:

  * verify and improve the norms and guidelines of the documentation and
  especially its update process together with the PSC.
  * update the manual to include all features that are available within the latest QGIS release (2.12).
  * update figures, if necessary according to the defined guidelines (size, desktop-environment, resolution,…).
  * populate the manual with further short examples and improved descriptions, without competing with the training manual.
  * do these in a nice clear and concise writing style, taking inspiration from other software manuals, if available.

  If you think this is something you are able to do, please contact the QGIS PSC using this form and let us know!

  Best wishes,
  Otto