Possibly companies that wish to give back to open source could contribute to a professional documentation fund. In this case digital publication will enable the money to be used most efficiently.
Such a project could have a project owner and other contributors, including those who contribute text and others who provide brief notes on their own cases. In there, someone who is an experienced editor. I am right now on a business trip in Sweden learning a new piece of industrial software, which is used by lots of big companies. Turns out a lot of the knowledge is locked in people's heads and one result is that much time is spent on seminars. Some is okay but having docs to digest in advance could save time and money. If a project is going to be rolled out across other offices then writing docs early could save money later. I don't know if this is applicable to Catalyst but possibly it is when training a development team to get them up to speed more quickly. Writing documentation can be a learning experience but it is critical to have an expert provide the focus and approach. Perhaps that could be outlined sparsely and have others flesh it out with supervision by the expert. $60K for a book sounds like a nice deal. I recently worked on translating a book on FindBugs, a cool sourceforge project that finds bugs in Java code (wish one existed for Perl!) for a commercial publisher (ASCII) for the Japanese market, just editing it was a big job. I don't know if it would attract enough people but I would likely buy digital books on Catalyst. My two cents. Matt R. _______________________________________________ List: [email protected] Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
