[FM Discuss] Hi folks

[M R]

Hi Greg (and whomever else):


Thanks.  One of the follow-up questions I had is about the relationship between a given Floss documentation project and the 'official' documentation supported by that software's own organization.  Two examples (since I happen to be familiar with these tools): Audacity and Blender.  Both of these organizations have documentation sites (online manuals, wikis, tutorial pages) that are far more detailed and comprehensive (not to mention more current to latest releases) than the respective Floss doc projects.  I'd add the same for GIMP, actually. So on the one hand, this offers a great deal of scope for adding more detail, additional chapters etc to the relevant Floss books.  On the other hand, it somewhat begs the question of why we'd be doing this in the first place?  Some of the Floss doc projects I've seen are not specific to a particular technology, or focus on some niche use of that technology, so in those cases they're clearly not duplicating other doc efforts elsewhere.  But when it comes to basic user manuals on tools that are already very richly documented....I am just curious about who is reading the Floss documentation vs the official documentation.  For me personally, Floss is promising as a way to build up a technical writing portfolio, so I'm happy to have the opportunity to add a few chapters to the Blender or Audacity or GIMP books, or indeed maybe write a whole manual for Unity3D, which is an open-source tool I know pretty well and not yet represented on Floss.  But I do have to wonder who might actually *read* such docs, as opposed to simply going to the makers' own documentation.


I'd be interested in answers from anyone on the list.   It's clear that the original Floss project in the late aughts had an important place in open-source documentation, esp in Dutch and other non-English European languages.  10 years on, I'm not as certain.  But I'm very open to being convinced.


best,


Matt




________________________________
From: Discuss <discuss-bounces at lists.flossmanuals.net> on behalf of Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 2, 2018 4:08 PM
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Hi folks

On 01/02/2018 04:26 PM, M R wrote:
> My name is Mathew Roberts.  I have had two major careers to date, one as
> an English professor (for about 8 years and then another 8 and counting)
> and another as a technologist (primarily a software engineering manager
> for eCollege, 2000-2008).  Looking to contribute to Floss.   Clearly the
> first and easiest thing I can do is copy-edit new manual material -- a
> huge amount of my teaching has been composition and technical writing,
> so that comes easily enough without any particular domain knowledge.
> What I'd like to do eventually is contribute a chapter of my own to a
> manual --- right now I'm looking at Inkscape for example -- but to that
> end I'd need to become much, much more familiar with the tool.   Happily
> I'm in the market for a new open-source raster-based image editor
> anyway, so I'll probably give it a look.  Meanwhile I'll probably poke
> around in the Audacity manual as I'm much more familiar with that tool,
> and certainly do some sound-editing in a hobby capacity.
>

Hi Matt,

You might start out just poking around, looking for issues with the way
things are explained in whatever manuals that interest you. I haven't
done so much here, but I've never had any problems with someone
critiquing my work, offering better ways to say what I'm trying to get
across.

Greg

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