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.<br><br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br><br>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." <a href="http://is.gd/oy52">http://is.gd/oy52</a><br>
<br>I think that if we can keep the community vibe at FM strong, we can recruit editors/maintainers who "<span>edit books because they still play an important role in learning" (to quote from your reasons for editing books). I think that </span>our book model is also helpful in that it helps with the tying together disparate contributions. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Anne<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Andy Oram <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andyo@oreilly.com" target="_blank">andyo@oreilly.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com" target="_blank">radar.oreilly.com</a>) 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.<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/06/rethinking-community-documentation.html" target="_blank">http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/06/rethinking-community-documentation.html</a><br>
<br>
Linking disparate contributions, ratings, and other ways of marshalling the flood will become more important.<br>
<br>
Andy<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Anne Gentle<br>email: <a href="mailto:annegentle@justwriteclick.com" target="_blank">annegentle@justwriteclick.com</a><br>blog: <a href="http://www.justwriteclick.com" target="_blank">www.justwriteclick.com</a><br>