Doc Collab Conversation at OSDevCon
The following are my notes of a discussion with Perez, an attendee at both FOSDEM and OSDevCon who is interested in documentation and currently works as a chip designer, but hopes to enter into software development because of the excitement around open source.
There should be a front-end for doc content entry that is easy to use. We discussed this point and how to maintain trust of the reader. He himself had not considered differing levels of trust of documents per se, and made me think that we might also think of this problem less. That is, it might hold us back less from moving forward with unmoderated wiki development of documentation.
Perez shares the feeling that we espouse in Sun software documentation regarding a focus on increased communication outweighing any focus on formatting. Focus should be totally on the content, let the formatting be automated. He asked what I bring to the conferences and also to my user group SVOSUG. I replied that I come to ask what documentation developers and system administrators need and what they might contribute. He replied that is quite a luxury to be able to provide for an open source project, doc support that is. This echoes a comment on my blog recently about the importance of documentation of open source products and the common lack of documentation in many projects.
We talked about excitement of open source software with respect to having information freely available on the web, not just proprietary information held closely by corporate engineers. This is a problem in his industry, much like what we have in commercial software, that results in difficulties, as follows:
-Training of new individuals is time-consuming and slow because information is held by a small number of people and cannot be easily shared or transferred because those individuals are so busy and because the information they have is competitive.
We discussed how open source is a better and overall excellent model because it allows information to be shared, communities can help one another freely across corporate boundaries and a willingness to do so is encouraged by the model.
Perez asked about the Starter Kit and wondered where they are and if the left hands simply knows not what the right hand is doing. This is in response to not having kits at OSDevCon and the many individuals at FOSDEM who had ordered the kit last month, never to receive them. I told him about the new web page above and that this should improve the situation greatly.
We talked about the FreeBSD documentation, how it is very excellent and the recent re-design of the web site aligned with PHP docs. I feel that we should look to these leaders in information design as we determine if it is something we can do for docs.sun.com. Because I'm with these developers, administrators, communities members so often, I do hear very often about deficiencies of docs.sun.com, and one is crying out for PDFs and collections of them lately. But, again I think we should look at FreeBSD handbook and overall design to learn where we can improve.
