• A Good Model for a Community Docs Project
Not only does OpenOffice look like a really viable authoring environment for community-developed, open source user documentation, it comes with an already-functioning doc writing community that can serve as a model for many others.
I've spent some time looking at the OOoAuthors.org site, and there's a lot of really good stuff here, stuff I plan to adopt as I try to set up a user docs community at Open-MPI.org.
Their website has a number of writing guides and a basic chapter template that seem quite reasonable and could apply to a number of open documentation projects, at least as a starting point.
For example: (these are OpenOffice .odt documents)
The chapter template
that they use for all their documentation is a simple .odt file that we
can probably adopt without much change. There are additional resources pages.
Another valuable use of the oooauthors.org site is that it outlines the
procedures they use to develop, review, and publish their user
documentation. See their Contribute page.
A first step would be for everyone to get started with Open Office.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who is currently using OpenOffice as their authoring environment in a community, open source, documentation project. Comment, please...
( Dec 13 2007, 02:47:00 PM PST )
[Technical Writing]
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