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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Content Remix: Floss Manuals Provides Community Technology, Community Writing

Many technical writers, content managers and information architects work on software development teams, or at least tangentially to them. You may have heard of Google’s Summer of Code or BarCamp or PodCamp and wondered, like Janet Swisher did at A Techie Tech Writer, why aren’t there more free real-life community events for technical writers?

imageA collaborative, creative event does exist for technical writers - it’s the BookSprint (read Anne Gentle’s blog post about the event), originated and hosted by FLOSS Manuals. A BookSprint functions like a week-long workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are a social experience where writers form a community who share common goals and experiences.

If you’ve used open source software before, you know that support and documentation are two of the success factors for an open source project - without a community assisting with these two components, open source software doesn’t reach its full potential. This crossroads is where Adam Hyde and FLOSS Manuals comes in. FLOSS Manuals, located at flossmanuals.net, is a collection of manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source software. The FLOSS acronym stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The manuals are friendly and simple, and they are intended to encourage people to explore the wide range of free, open source alternatives to expensive and restrictively licensed software.

imageAt FLOSS Manuals can find a manual for the One Laptop Per Child XO computer, the education project whose goal was to produce a $100 laptop for children of the world using all open source software. Adam is the founder of the FLOSS Manuals Foundation. Adam leads the community of free documentation writers that publish free manuals about free software across multiple languages. Adam offered the FLOSS Manuals tool chain to One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) last year, and OLPC volunteer Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick was working on the OLPC documentation and immediately saw the benefits of the platform for wiki writing and collaboration, plus the promise of PDF publishing and multiple language translations.

Currently, Anne and Adam are inviting writers who are knowledgeable about the XO laptop to a BookSprint to update the documentation for the XO laptop and its operating system, Sugar. The last week of August in Austin Texas, writers will give a week’s time to be curators of information housed in wikis and websites everywhere, bringing it all together into the FLOSS Manual TWiki implementation to be ready for online viewing or gorgeous print output.

If you’d like to be involved by donating money, you can go to flossmanuals.net/donate and give any amount, but here are some ideas:

  • $500 would provide hotel accommodations for a writer
  • $250 would provide a catered lunch for all the writers
  • $100 would provide gas money for many writers all week

If you have other ideas for getting involved, please contact Anne Gentle at annegentle at justwriteclick dot com with your ideas. 

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Filed under: Content Reuse : Structured Content : Technical Writing : User-Generated Content : Wikis

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The Technical Writer Song

Monday, August 11, 2008

Check out “The Technical Writer Song”, a YouTube video from a technical communicator known only as T3chnicalWriter. If you like it, you might also like his other ditty, Cheap Tech Writer.

Making the Case for DITA, The Unlikely Demise of Adobe FrameMaker, and Finally, XSLT for MS Word

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

The Content Wrangler has the dish on structured writing. Is DITA dead? Is FrameMaker defunct? Has MS Word actually survived the XML wars and emerged as a user-friendly XML authoring tool? It all started with an article by Scott Abel calling on all DITA evangelists to promote use cases and real-world examples designed to help folks understand the DITA value proposition. The article sparked an interesting conversation about whether DITA will--or should--survive, while at the same time the demise of FrameMaker is still being discussed. We should remind you that discussion has been raging for nearly ten years now. And good news for MS Word users, a company out of Canada has come up with a tool that leverages Word XML capabilities--no, really--and allows users to focus on creating content instead of becoming XML experts. Read the article in DCL News.

Quark Purchases In.vision Research: Now They’re Really In The XML Authoring Business

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Earlier this year, Quark announced it’s dynamic publishing solution, one of the smartest moves in the industry, if you ask us. This month, Quark announced that it has acquired the assets of In.vision Research Corporation, a Florida-based software company that develops a popular add-in to Microsoft Word (XPress Author) that facilitates XML authoring.

The acquisition is a smart one for Quark as they will now be in close partnership with Microsoft, providing support for Microsoft Word users, the largest group of content creators on the planet. Quark also gains products that support industry standards such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and Structured Product Labeling (SPL), an initiative of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which helps Quark gain access to markets in which XML authoring is a necessity.

For In.vision, being acquired by Quark drastically improves their chance of success. Quark’s an established firm with great brand recognition, and the human and financial resources to take the products developed by In.vision to the next level. Quark also has the marketing know how—and bandwidth—to get the recently acquired In.vision products in front of people who need them, something In.vision wouldn’t have been able to easily do without such support.


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