Matt has decided to use his skills as a writer and content manager to help the Gnome project. This is excellent. Documentation on Linux software, as any fule kno, is not great in the vast majority of cases. I’ve said countless times in the past that there must be writers as well as hackers out there with an interest in Free software who would help with this, and then, when there was one right under my nose, I never even thought to pimp the idea to him. Good thing my friends are smarter than me and don’t need my suggestions. Good work, Matt. I expect Gnome to get even better than it already is as a result of his contribution.
On I wrote Doing one's bit, on the subject of Uncategorized.
Ian Bicking
Matthew Revell
Thanks for the props, Aq :)
Ian, you mention something that really has pushed me to become involved in free/open source software documentation. Aside from the fairly obvious "I use it, so I should give something back" motivation, my own experience, in learning to use GNU/Linux etc., has been hampered by documentation.
The open source/free world is still, I believe, aimed at hackers. Yes, there's wonderful work being done on making Linux useful for enterprise but that still depends on having a sys admin, who can do all the nasty stuff. So, while we're still at that stage, we need great documentation, to help the non-hacker to use open source/free software.
So, at the moment we need that crutch, because poor usability is out there. For the longer term, documentation can go some way towards highlighting just how difficult/illogical/ususable a piece of software is.
Something that particularly interests me is using this medium - the web - to better communicate how to use software. The various HOW-TO docs and official manuals that accompany open source/free software projects are rarely, if ever, formatted for the web. I'd love to produce web based documentation that takes advantage of all the wonderful knowledge we have of how the web can be made more useful. That is sorely lacking in the OSS world. It's made worse because most of us obtain our software using an internet connection, so the primary medium we use to learn about the software, if we can't just work out, is the web!
So, to bring the ramble to a close: we need docs to continue the opening of OSS to the non-hacker and I believe we need to make far greater use of the peculiarities of the web, when producing documentation.
I'm always a little suspicious of documentation. Documentation can be a crutch for poor usability. Of course that's a horrible generalization, but no one likes to read documentation, and more documentation won't make them happier.
Of course, this is where editorial skills are needed -- there tends to be content all over the place in the form of informal HOWTOs. And a good writer recognizes the benefit of brevity.
What's really important is that the writer have a relationship with the thing they are writing, so when they encounter something that is difficult to explain (difficult relative to its importance) they can ask the author to fix it. To me that feedback loop is a big part of making usable applications.