Documentation needs? How FLOSS Manuals Can Hel
Presented by: Janet Swisher and Anne Gentle FLOSS Manuals is a community, tool provider, and website dedicated to creating free documentation for free software and related aspects of the free culture movement. The website removes barriers to contributing to documentation by combining a simple authoring interface with documentation-oriented content management and publishing tools. It supports both wide-open collaboration and editorial control by separating in-progress work in the "Write" area from published work in the "Read" area. The FLOSS Manuals community comprises over 1000 registered users who collectively have produced over 40 books, mostly in the last two years. The group has also developed and honed the "book sprint" process, in which a complete manual is written in a brief period of 2 to 5 days. Both the website and the community actively support translations, with no one language considered primary. Manuals can be remixed, combining chapters from different books to create a new book, and you can export to HTML or embed content on a website. This presentation describes the features of FLOSS Manuals project that deliver these benefits, and discusses ways that free software projects can leverage them to create documentation.
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Documentation needs? How FLOSS Manuals Can Hel
- 1. Documentation Needs? How FLOSS Manuals Can Help Janet Swisher Anne Gentle Texas Linux Fest April 10, 2010
- 2. Does your documentation suck? Flickr: Theresa Thompson
- 5. "Documentation is hard." "Let's go programming!"
- 6. It's hard for programmers to take a user's perspective. Flickr:Yandle
- 7. Traditional FOSS doc tools are powerful, but hard for non-techies to use. Flickr: couragextoxlive
- 10. FLOSS Manuals is
- 11. FLOSS Manuals is ...
- 13. ... collaborative writing and editing ...
- 15. ... remixing and publishing.
Notes de l'éditeur
- Biggest concerns: quality and completeness Can you interact with it or the people writing it? Experience: reading, browsing, searching, finding
- Most programmers hate to write, and would rather do almost anything else.
- This is a structural problem, so don't feel bad about it.
- E.g., DocBook, LaTeX Structured, multiple outputs. But arcane mark-up syntax, and difficult to customize.
- Unstructured, on-line only. Let's face it, motivation is a problem. We focus on "good enough" tools.
- a community of people who are passionate about FOSS documentation. Members of other FOSS projects who write their docs on the site Community activists who want to help people do stuff with FOSS Translators who want more docs in their language Writers who want to foster better docs for FOSS a writing community -- at least 1800 registered contributors on the site and 300 on Discuss mailing list
- a website implementation that supports:
- WYSILWYG authoring interface Storage in XHTML Index of "chapters", which enables remixing across "books" Chat (IRC connection) built in
- Not just translating, but building community.
- Books or smaller, interlocked documents? Despite trend on web toward multiple independent, loosely connected documents, FLOSS Manuals contributors believe many topics deserve full books. Remix is a gesture toward the other, looser organizational model.
- an open source tools project
- Programs which perform this task are called objavi (pronounced "ob-YAH-vee", as if the J was a Y), after the Croatian word "objavi!" meaning "publish!". FLOSS Manuals books are written and stored as HTML, but are converted to PDF and other formats for printing, reading, or further processing. We're on the second Objavi, written in 2009 by Douglas Bagnall for FLOSS Manuals with support from sesawe.net and Internews. It was extended to output epub documents with support from the Internet Archive.
- The next generation of the FLOSS Manuals software will no longer be a single instance of a wiki, but a platform for collaborative authoring. With the exception of Booki, there is no software available for this practice. Some have tried wiki and CMS software and find its not easy. Wikis are for the asynchronous development of unstructured web content. CMS are for the management of web-structured online content. Booki is something new. The Booki interface is designed around the authors and their needs to write, to discuss their views, to seek assistance with partner writers, to translate or reuse content and to publish completed works. While rapid development of content is the core focus of Booki, using a platform like this you can take the time to write a book by yourself as well as collaborate to produce high quality content very quickly.
- We'll ask you for your ideas, too.
- You can write a book, sell it, and keep the proceeds.