We spent all day at the Ginger Press, as the library is closed on Sunday. The food continued fabulous. Also, JAM provided Café-Tasse chocolates. (JAM is the first person I've ever met whose business card says "Evangelist, Senior Writer".)
I helped out with the Gnome team's user and task brainstorming, led by Lynda Chiotti. The Gnome doc team (all four of whom were at WOS), have committed to completely rewriting the Gnome User Guide with a task focus for Gnome 3.0, due for release next March. This will:
- Result in a much more usable document.
- Set a new standard for Gnome application docs to follow.
- Sidestep the copyright issues of converting the existing content to a Creative Commons license, as it will all be replaced.
The Drupal folks spent their time converting the Writing Open Source site from a conference focus to a community focus. There are now forums for Writing, Tech and Tools, Community, and "Ginger Press" (general discussion). We've also started sections for a sample style guide, and best practices.
The Drupal folks also had discussions about the possibilities of integrating Drupal with DITA, making it possible to use Drupal as a DITA content management system. They have other priorities in the short term, but are definitely bought into the value of DITA in the longer term. I'm very excited about this, because it helps to round out the open source tool set for DITA. The DITA Open Toolkit is a great thing for producing output from DITA, but there has been a lack of open source tools for authoring or managing DITA topics. Filling that gap would make DITA much more usable for the open source community, providing a framework for structured authoring for and using open source tools, and attracting more technical writers to work on open source projects to gain DITA skills.
Discussion continued late into the evening again, on a more serious tone this time, including issues such as reward systems for volunteers, and how to motivate those who are solid contributors, but will never be "rock stars". On the topic of attracting volunteers, Emma recommended reading The Experience Economy, which argues that selling "experiences" is the next stage for business. The relevance to open source is that people will pay (money or time) for experiences that they believe will transform them and give them skills they never had before. Too many open source projects advertise for volunteers based on what the project needs, not based on what the project can offer volunteers from the experience of volunteering.
The whole three-day meeting was very exciting and energizing. It was fun to share technical communication best practices with open source doc teams, and gratifying that they could see the value. I gained some good ideas for ways to encourage open source community members to contribute to documentation. While the group was small (about 15 attendees), it will form the core of what we hope will be a growing a community of open source documentation enthusiasts.