2010 Talks:
Documentation Needs? How FLOSS Manuals Can Help
Presented by: Janet Swisher and Anne Gentle
FLOSS Manuals is a community, tool provider, and website dedicated to creating free documentation for free software and related aspects of the free culture movement. The website removes barriers to contributing to documentation by combining a simple authoring interface with documentation-oriented content management and publishing tools. It supports both wide-open collaboration and editorial control by separating in-progress work in the "Write" area from published work in the "Read" area. The FLOSS Manuals community comprises over 1000 registered users who collectively have produced over 40 books, mostly in the last two years. The group has also developed and honed the "book sprint" process, in which a complete manual is written in a brief period of 2 to 5 days. Both the website and the community actively support translations, with no one language considered primary. Manuals can be remixed, combining chapters from different books to create a new book, and you can export to HTML or embed content on a website.
This presentation describes the features of FLOSS Manuals project that deliver these benefits, and discusses ways that free software projects can leverage them to create documentation.
Janet Swisher is a technical writer who has worked for various high tech companies in Austin. She has contributed to documentation for OpenOffice.org and Enthought Tool Suite (Python libraries), as well participating in a number of FLOSS Manuals book sprints, including One Laptop Per Child, Firefox, and How to Bypass Internet Censorship. She blogs about technical documentation, open source software, and related topics at http://www.janetswisher.com
Anne Gentle has worked as technical writer for Rockwell Automation, BMC Software, Advanced Solutions International, and now Informatica. She is the author of Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. She serves in an advisory role for LugIron in Austin, Texas and she volunteers as a documentation maintainer for FLOSS Manuals, working on manuals for One Laptop Per Child and SugarLabs. She writes a blog at justwriteclick.com and welcomes conversation there.