By cel4145 on

I'd like to announce a new Drupal community and documentation project, Purdue University's Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP). Sponsored by the Professional Writing Program at Purdue, OSDDP is a community of almost 200 instructors and students from business and professional writing classes working together on a variety of projects:

  • Documentation for open source software -- for the next 8 weeks, the students in my technical writing class will be creating an end user documentation manual for Drupal 4.5. In the spring, I hope to have students work on OpenOffice user documentation. While there are only a few technical writing class offerings in the program, we anticipate additional sections writing documentation for other open source apps in the future.
  • White papers on open source and open content -- students across many sections of writing classes have been writing white papers--some of which will soon be published to the site--on subjects such as
    • OpenOffice
    • The History of Mozilla
    • Open Standards vs Closed Standards
    • Open Source in Education
    • Wikipedia
  • Documentation for the OSDDP site

As OSDDP is based on the open source development model, all projects are publicly reviewed and managed using Drupal's project module. And all documentation published to the site in the OSSDDP Guide or provided to clients is done so under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike2.0.

This is a novel method for conducting professional writing projects, and we anticipate the project may grow in scope over the coming year. For instance, we want student groups to do more work with clients in relation to open source projects or even clients merely working with open source software (for example, Drupal sites). Therefore, Drupal developers and website users are invited to submit requests for documentation work. Realize that the bulk of the writers are business students, so imagine that they would be best at creating texts such as marketing materials or recommendation reports on why using Drupal might be suitable for a particular business model.

Feel free to come by and register. Learn more about the project by consulting our most recent press release or by reading the overview page. And if you are interested in serving as a client, post to the front page describing your work or site and the kinds of documents you would be interested in having produced. If you have a suggestion for a white paper that might serve the open source community, feel free to post a new issue to our project module.

Comments

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

Great work! I've put a post up on Bryght announcing our intention to participate in this. As I mention there, we've started working on a Drupal User Guide (which in part will have some "best practices" material as well as true user guide material).

I wrote an overview of the 4 text-based node types as well as took a first cut at describing book module.

--
Boris Mann
Bryght Guy

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

Will these snippets be interegrated in the Drupal handbook?

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

Integration is going to be an issue. I don't see any way around it right now, since the book pages are just not conducive to quickly developing and editing content (nevermind having to know HTML to format).

I think the content we'll be working on will fit into the user's guide. Like OSDDP, I think developing outside of Drupal then submitting to the handbook will likely be the model we follow.

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

I'd rather know HTML than one Wiki syntax per Wiki.

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

Agreed.

One word: HTMLArea.

Again, my preference would be an improved book module with more permissions (e.g. allow edits by anonymous users). For now, an open wiki is a quick way to get us part of the way there. The HTML can easily be exported somewhere else.

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

I don't get it.

If you want, I can make you a 'site maintainer' so you can make the changes directly at drupal.org. That would effectively eliminate the integration problem, or help you integrate the documentation afterwards.

Boris Mann’s picture

Boris Mann commented

It's me, it's our resellers, it's Richard, it's Roland -- can you make all of them site maintainers?

Charlie is going to take on the work of "porting" the stuff his students create into the system. We'll do the same.

But we'll actually write some documentation (less talk, more doc!) and go from there.

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

It's me, it's our resellers, it's Richard, it's Roland -- can you make all of them site maintainers?

Now I understood. Thanks for the clarification, Boris.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

Thanks! I would also encourage you to post to OSDDP's front page, especially if you would be interested in having any student groups work on marketing materials for Bryght. Next week, many of the business writing classes will be starting their final projects for the semester, and Bryght would be the kind of client they might want to work with :)

As for the documentation, you'll see from my response to Dries below that some of my technical students are working on similar content. Since it'll be published with a Creative Commons copyleft license, anyone can use and rewrite it for their work with Drupal. In fact, I'd really like to see a push for this licensing with all new Drupal documentation and marketing materials.

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

Great news! To support this project, I can setup 'book maintainer accounts' on drupal.org so your students can integrate their changes directly in the Drupal handbook. Would that help to make the documentation flow back to drupal.org? I'd like to avoid integration nightmares and go for a single documentation repository. How did you plan dealing with that?

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

The students in my technical writing class are working on 8 distinct sections for end user documentation, the goal being to produce a small manual:

  • Introduction to Drupal
  • User registration and personal account information
  • Creating and editing nodes on Drupal; creating comments on Drupal
  • Understanding nodes and taxonomy: Drupal's Architecture and how Drupal intertwines content through various displays.
  • Understanding and using the collaborative book.
  • Drupal's news aggregator and RSS (understanding the various displays, how to input new feeds, and what is RSS, etc.)
  • Understanding the tracker display and other Drupal navigation features
  • Overviews of Drupal's private messaging and notification functions (not available on the test site)

We have issues open on OSDDP for them, and as they complete drafts, I'll have them also post them to the project module here on drupal.org for feedback. The submission format for this stage of the assignment is in HTML, so it will be easy enough for them to post their versions to an issue as an attachment. Once the project is completed, I can post the final versions into the handbook on drupal.org.

This comprises Project 2 for the class. During the last five weeks or so of the semester, Project 3 will consist of formatting these texts into a pdf manual. We'll use Adobe InDesign for that project. We'll also create some Flash-based tutorials for some of the guide using Wink. Once Project 3 is finished, I'll consult the developer list as to the best way to make these versions of the end user documentation available on drupal.org.

Bobby Sanders’s picture

Bobby Sanders commented

The Compliment:
Charlie, truly GREAT stuff. I wish you the best and offer any service that I can provide, e.g. proofreading, perhaps.

A Dumb Question:
Yo say "Project 3 will consist of formatting these texts into a pdf manual. We'll use Adobe InDesign for that project." You also indicate that you will be writing documentation for OpenOffice. Why not use OpenOffice's export to PDF feature to create these files instead of AdobeInDesign?

A Suggestion:
Hmmmm. This should probably be a comment to the Promotional Documentation Development message. I'll post it there.

P.S. I was one of the moderators at the Drupal presentation of the NetLawyer's Tool A Day seminar. I remember your fine work there, Charlie, and am most happy to see that you are continuing in this direction.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

is that a lot of this will be an in class project, and there's no OpenOffice on the machines. It's possible I might be able to get it installed--the IT dept controls the computers--but I can't count on it.

And thanks. Didn't realize I had managed to make any lasting impressions with the NetLawyer's Tool A Day seminar :)

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

I think it would be a good idea to select some rss feeds from OSDDP. That way we can follow the work on drupal.org

We could even try to convert the RSS feed items into nodes if they are interesting enough.

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