documentation
Oct. 12th, 2008 05:21 pmrecurring issue personally, and noted elseblog in comments about attempting to increase open source market share:
open source documentation availability is random and patchy, and generally written for an expert audience. i.e. if there are instructions at all, and people can find them, they may not be able to understand them because they don't know much past opening terminal. and then those people run away.
i put this out there: if you have a favorite open source project that needs documentation love, tell me why i should lend them a hand.
i'm not volunteering to discover how to do things and write a forum post somewhere*, i'm volunteering to turn terse technical information from a developer into something an end user can understand and implement.
feel free to send people to me.
ETA: TLDP is probably a place for me to start. i'm not dissing the people who do get the information out there, i'm interested in making that information more elegant. hopefully it's stress-reducing.
*because i don't have the skills as yet. thank the gods for those people. i love them, may they never stop sharing. i'm continually amazed at how helpful random strangers can be.
open source documentation availability is random and patchy, and generally written for an expert audience. i.e. if there are instructions at all, and people can find them, they may not be able to understand them because they don't know much past opening terminal. and then those people run away.
i put this out there: if you have a favorite open source project that needs documentation love, tell me why i should lend them a hand.
i'm not volunteering to discover how to do things and write a forum post somewhere*, i'm volunteering to turn terse technical information from a developer into something an end user can understand and implement.
feel free to send people to me.
ETA: TLDP is probably a place for me to start. i'm not dissing the people who do get the information out there, i'm interested in making that information more elegant. hopefully it's stress-reducing.
*because i don't have the skills as yet. thank the gods for those people. i love them, may they never stop sharing. i'm continually amazed at how helpful random strangers can be.