Welcome to our recent newcomers. Most discussion on producing (technical writing, editing, reviewing, indexing, etc) of OpenOffice.org documentation takes place on the auth...@documentation.openoffice.org list. This list (dev@) is more for discussions of project infrastructure and policy. It's good to subscribe to both.
To get started, look at what we're doing and get an idea of what might interest you: user guide? FAQs? How-to's? Tutorials? If you have a technical background (programming or system administration, for example) you might be interested in working on the docs aimed at developers and sysadmins; otherwise, you'll probably want to concentrate on docs aimed at users. Let us know, and that might help us help you a bit more. Also read the style guide, writing guide, and other instructions on the OOoAuthors website. I have started a task list for the user guides here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/User_Guides Technical writing in the real world involves a lot of research and planning. Most of the user guides (with the exception of the Base Guide) are now in the updating-and-enhancement phase. When OOo itself changes, we may need to update some chapters. Members of the team need to keep track of these changes in the program and what chapters are affected; that is easier if several people have each "adopted" a chapter or several or an entire book. We also need people to go through the existing chapters and recommend improvements: Can we explain some things better? Are some things missing that should be there? Should we write a stand-alone tutorial for a particular task and then refer to it in the user guide, instead of putting it in the guide itself? Write a note to the Authors list with your ideas so we can discuss them. One way to get an idea of what's missing (or not explained well) is to follow the OOo community forum and see what people are asking (and what the answers are). http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/ In addition to keeping the user guides up to date and improving them, we want to develop a series of tutorials aimed at specific audiences, explaining how to do common tasks, using real-world examples. I have started a list on this page and the pages linked from it: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/Tutorials Lastly, when I have time I am working on expanding and improving the instructions for newcomers. This is going slowly, so apologies if what we have is incomplete or unclear. Jean -- Jean Hollis Weber Co-Lead, OpenOffice.org Documentation Project --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@documentation.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@documentation.openoffice.org
