[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Anne Gentle]

Great thought exercise for me, Andy. Thanks for starting this discussion. I
love your article on Rethinking Community Documentation and have referred to
it several times over the past couple of years for talks I've given to
technical writers about wikis and documentation.

I have been thinking about microvolunteerism as a model for FLOSS Manuals -
and Adam's idea of a small box for each chapter or each book indicating the
top priority tasks that need done is a step in that direction it seems to
me.

The next step might be a Twitter account from FLOSS Manuals that doles out
little work pieces via Twitter. Followers of that Twitter account who are
experiencing microboredom (funny term, that) could look for a small editing
or writing task they could complete.

Now, those ideas only address the assigning of work. The quality check of
work is going to be more interesting. Let's keep talking about it and
brainstorming.

I think that Wikipedia's fast, accurate editing success stems from the sense
of a strict style guide - "everyone" knows what encyclopedia entries should
read like, and their "training" is reading a couple of other entries to see
how they're written. Now, before Adam has a conniption, I don't think
Wikipedia's model is right for us. I think their barrier to entry, strict
hierarchy, and box-out methods aren't our culture or style. But your article
does point out a difficulty for FM compared to Wikipedia - it's very
difficult to train writers to consider audience, keep the detail level
correct, the sorts of things you mention in "Failures of Writing."
http://is.gd/oy52

I think that if we can keep the community vibe at FM strong, we can recruit
editors/maintainers who "edit books because they still play an important
role in learning" (to quote from your reasons for editing books). I think
that our book model is also helpful in that it helps with the tying together
disparate contributions.

Although, I do have a story of where I myself stumbled just last week. I
started the Grannie's Guide to Sugar, and wrote two nice chapters about
Sugar on a Stick on Windows - creating the stick and using the stick, more
or less. I fully intended to use the %INCLUDE% code in the Sugar book to
include those two chapters from the Grannie's Guide in the Sugar book. But
Walter beat me to it, and wrote about Sugar on a Stick in the Sugar
installation chapter. Reuse opportunity wasted! I tell this story because
it's possible that not only do we need editors for the individual chapters
but also information architects who can be sure we're reusing high-quality
content where we can.

I do agree with your ways we can measure the usefulness of the documentation
and I'd love to come up with ideas for integrating those measures into FLOSS
Manuals. I think that a good first step would be stats analysis of the
content we already have - what are most visited, what's the bounce rate, are
they linked to often, that sort of thing.

I also have had those moments of "oh my gosh what have I gotten myself
into." It's okay, a few deep breaths and I'm back at it. :) I don't think
that's what your moment is here, I think that you're onto some ideas that FM
is uniquely positioned to provide for community documentation. Let's see
what we can do.

Anne

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:

> Adam mentioned that the FSF book sprint this past weekend had more people
> working simultaneously on a book than ever before at FLOSS Manuals. We
> divided the book into smaller and smaller files to enable simultaneous
> editing. The FLOSS Manuals server held up admirably (yay, tech team) and the
> IRC channel helped a lot to recruit volunteers, coordinate contributions,
> and bolster morale (yay again, tech team).
>
> But this experience is just the nose of the camel. We're going to become
> more popular and we're going to get more contributions in small chunks. I'm
> still a little nervous about the job I'm assigning myself of going over the
> whole manual and making the flow just as good as any work by a single expert
> author.
>
> As I reported in previous mail, O'Reilly folks are interested in FLOSS
> Manuals. But all the buzz around here (you can get a sense of it by visiting
> radar.oreilly.com) is about really tiny exchanges of information: what
> happens with Twitter and other even newer initiatives. The new generation is
> on mobile devices and wants interaction as much as information. They're
> quite happy with information in chunks smaller than this email message.
>
> I think that, despite the name "FLOSS Manuals," we have to think about
> smaller contributions and about how to tie them together. I've known this at
> least since 2004 when I first wrote about online contributions. Here's one
> of my articles for background:
>
>
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/06/rethinking-community-documentation.html
>
> Linking disparate contributions, ratings, and other ways of marshalling the
> flood will become more important.
>
> Andy
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>



-- 
Anne Gentle
email: annegentle at justwriteclick.com
blog: www.justwriteclick.com
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