[FM Discuss] why writing in collaboration is better

[Andy Oram]

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.

...