[FM Discuss] why writing in collaboration is better

[adam hyde]

hey

Andy...I think your ideas on working out topics on what to write are
really cool. We talked a lot about including them in booki - I hope you
still feel the passion to work on this?

I have a few questions about what you raise which I'd like your thoughts
on if you have a minute.... using your examples - the cold fusion doc
writer may have very few people using the docs but what they do have is
the motivation to write them. scraping FAQs, log files, and forums does
raise the potential audience by targeting a topic, but how do you
motivate someone to write the docs that answer those questions? 

secondly, i have written a few docs that i am sure not many have read
(ever tried streaming under Linux using VLC and icecast?...not many
have, but i wrote a doc to tell u how...), ..but...i'm still glad i did
it....there is something to writing docs that is inherently satisfying
to some...isn't this ok too?

adam




On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 11:01 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> Your reasoning looks valid to me, Adam. I don't have any particular
>  research or evidence to offer, but from my impressions visiting
>  documentation sites for technical projects (and getting book proposals
>  at O'Reilly), I have an idea about what happens with documents written
>  by a single person. Basically, someone who masters a topic gets
>  excited and wants share this knowledge. That's a lovely impulse, but
>  the person usually has no idea how many people want to read about it.
> 
> One example I like to cite is the two tutorials on the jquery.com site
>  about how to use jQuery with ColdFusion. I'd be curious to see whether
>  anyone clicked on this besides the author. (And perhaps his fellow
>  employees. He seems to work for ColdFusion.)
> 
> I love to encourage people to write about their passion (or in the
>  ColdFusion case, to further their organization's goals) but I hate to
>  see someone invest hours in something that hardly anybody reads. If I
>  think the author has potential to write something good, I talk to him
>  or her and try to find a more popular topic.
> 
> I've given my opinions on this list a few times before: technical
>  communities need to find ways to figure out the most pressing
>  questions and documentation needs in their communities. So far, FM has
>  relied on talking to project leaders, who informally know what people
>  are asking. I felt really good taking CiviCRM through this process,
>  but it actually didn't work so well on the CiviCRM manual in the end.
>  The other strategy I recommend is watching log files to see the hits
>  on various questions and documents.
> 
> Andy
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "adam hyde" <adam at flossmanuals.net>
> To: "floss" <discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 10:20:45 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: [FM Discuss] why writing in collaboration is better
> 
> hey,
> 
> I'm just getting together some material for the FLOSS Manuals
> presentation at Wikimania next month...
> 
> The topic for the presentation/discussion is 'open publishing' and I was
> pondering a few issues on this, so I thought maybe it would be good to
> try and gather some opinions and thoughts from the FM Community on a few
> things....
> 
> First up...what are peoples thoughts about collaborative writing and the
> life of a text? I have noted that in the few examples of FM manuals
> which are the result of (predominantly) one author, the manuals have
> less (much less) activity than manuals that started their life as
> collaborative exercises.
> 
> ...
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-- 
Adam Hyde
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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