<snip>
On 2013-04-09 I sent the following reminder to all individuals that had
expressed interest in working on documentation but had not yet signed up for
the mailing list:
You recently expressed interest in working on documentation for
ApacheOpenOffice. To date you have not signed up for our mailing list
which is
where we discuss everything having to do with documentation for the project.
Currently we are concentrating on user guides for Version 4.0 and we
need help of all sorts for these.If you are still interested please
subscribe to the mailing list by sending a blank e-mail to
mailto:doc-subscr...@openoffice.apache.org and follow the instructions
in the return email or for those that prefer using nntp instead set your
news reader to news.gmane.org and subscribe to
gmane.comp.apache.openoffice.doc and join us.
Regards Keith McKenna
To date I have had no replies. If one of our moderators could check and see
if we have had an increase from the 63 registered users that were on the
list that Dave Barton sent me on 2013-03-26 it would be greatly appreciated.
It is to say the least disheartening to look at the status page and see the
same few names as doing all the work both writing (Ricardo) and editing.
As a group we need to work towards finding ways to motivate others to become
more active and to recruit new members, especially those with knowledge of
Calc, Impress and Base who can start writing the Guides for those
applications.
Some thoughts on this.
We were successful in getting many offers of help. We did that by
putting a message on the www.openoffice.org home page, linking to a
blog post, etc. I don't know if anyone counted, but it seemed like we
had 15 or more people volunteer to help. But of the offers of help,
not many ultimately contributed.
Why is this so?
Did we call for volunteers too early, before we had enough structure
in the documentation tasks?
This is very possible. I do not believe that we have near enough
structure now.
Do few people actually know OpenOffice well-enough to author new
documentation topics?
I think this is a part of it. Another part is that some of those that
have the expertise do not like the wiki format where anyone can edit the
page and take it in a completely different direction.
Do we need more hand-holding and feedback for new volunteers as they
get started?
We definitely need more hand holding, but where are the people with the
time, inclination and knowledge to do it?
It is very easy for us to renew the call for volunteers. I'm sure we
could get another 15-20 offers of help. But before we do that it
would be good to understand what we could do differently. Otherwise
we'll get similar results, right?
I am afraid all that renewing the call for volunteers will accomplish at
this point is to add to the frustration level.
Idea: In the commercial world the people who write the documentation
do not start with product expertise. They need to learn that. So new
writers start by taking training classes, reading existing
documentation, etc. Their training is often similar or identical to
what technical support representatives go through. Then for new
features they learn about these by interviewing the developers, asking
them questions. Or in some cases there might be a design
specification they can work from. I could imagine that talking to
experienced users could also be helpful.
In other words, if new volunteers do not have the product expertise
that Ricardo has, then we need to suggest some ways that they can
develop that. Otherwise new volunteers will be limited, at least
initially, to reviewing drafts.
Rob, right now I would be ecstatic if we had people doing that. If you
look at the status page You will see Ricardo's name as author, mine as
and one of two others as proofreading, and mine as doing a technical review.
Right now I believe the documentation effort as a whole is suffering
from the lack of people who are knowledgeable in technical writing and
the processes and tasks that go along with that.
Let me go off and think a bit more about what else we can do to move the
documentation effort along.
Regards
Keith
Regards,
-Rob
Regards
Keith
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