17 Mar 09: Sprinting for Firefox at DocTrain West

I'm participating in my second FLOSS Manuals event in two weeks. After Winter Camp in Amsterdam, I had a week of "normal" life, and now I'm in Palm Springs, California at the DocTrain West conference, helping lead a book sprint to produce a manual for Firefox.

Right now, we have seven technical writers in a conference room, along with Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals, and Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. We've had at least that many people contributing remotely. The site shows that 22 people have logged into the site today, though I think one or two of those are working on other projects (that's cool, too).

We're "repurposing" some content from the Firefox Knowledge Base, but also generating new overview and conceptual content.

It's not too late if you want to join in. Just go to http://en.flossmanuals.net, click "Write" at the top of the page, and then click "Register" on the left side to create a login ID. Find the link for Firefox, and see if there are any chapters you'd like to work on. Click "edit" for the chapter, and dig in. There's nifty new IRC chat widget on the right side of the page, so you can talk to everyone else who's participating.

Category: Open Source | Posted by: jmswisher

Comments

06 May 09, 12:48:52 Paul Sholar wrote:

Hi, I sent some of these questions to Adam @ FLOSS, and he did briefly reply to me by pointing to a kind of "statement of purpose" document that's not easily found at the FLOSS site.

Is there a real need for these new FLOSS docs to exist? Why do you place an artificial deadline on yourselves when you work? How do you determine which topics go into the books (that is, avoid authoring descriptions already found elsewhere)? How do you go about revising the docs after they are released? Are the docs' individual topics going to be placed on the web? How did you determine the "look and feel" of the docs? (I find the Firefox doc, on first look, to be quite unattractive.)

07 May 09, 20:44:50 jmswisher wrote:

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your questions. Some of the docs on FLOSS Manuals site are kind of placeholders, to show the possibilities. But the ones that have been done in book sprints over the last year have been primarily done at the request of and in cooperation with the documented project's community.

The reason for doing sprints with deadlines: as the saying goes, "deadlines concentrate the mind wonderfully". Documentation done in folks' "spare time" tends not to get done at all. Plus there is fun and camaraderie in being in a group that is all focused on the same task.

The topics for a book sprint are worked out ahead of time by a small planning group, based on the needs of the target audience, but there is usually some adjustment when they actually are written.

Topics can be updated at any time. Each book has a maintainer who decides when and what to publish changes from the "Write" area to the "Read" area.

The docs' individual topics are already on the web --- you can use, link, or remix them however you want.

The design of the books is done by a designer who is working with the FLOSS Manuals project. If you make an HTML remix, you can change the styles; however, in the current site you're not able to save your style changes, or apply them to PDF. That may be addressed in the long term.

If I haven't addressed your questions adequately, or you have more questions, I invite you to join the FLOSS Manuals discussion list (http://lists.flossmanuals.n...) and post your questions there.

Add Comment

This item is closed, it's not possible to add new comments to it or to vote on it