The book will be under CC-BY license and will be provided as a free PDF as well as in printed form and possibly in HTML on my Taming OOo/LibO website. It should be useful for users of both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice (and other derivatives).

I am collecting topics on a wiki page on The Document Foundation’s website, and I will probably also put the list on my Taming OOo/LibO website.

You are very welcome to add your “wish list” of topics or examples to be included in the book. I don’t promise to include them all, but it will be a better book if I know what information readers want.

You are also very welcome to review and comment on the book as it develops. I will put drafts on my website for this purpose.

I suspect I won’t get around any time soon to updating the website version of my book on self-publishing using OOo, so those pages are mostly out of date, although you can still get the PDF from this page.

I am honored to appear in a book containing essays by some of the field’s leaders whom I admire greatly, including Carolyn Rude, Michelle Corbin, Geoff Hart, and George Hayhoe (an incomplete list).

This presentation covers how to develop editing standards for content. It provides tips on how to get started when no conventions exist and how to improve coverage of topics when time and resources are limited. It describes how to get buy-in for editing standards from management and project members. This topic is of interest to all editors because pushback against editing changes is very common, and consistency is difficult to maintain without coworkers’ buy-in to established standards.

Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.

In this paper, I define troubleshooting procedures and briefly sketch out how they are developed. Then I analyze the genre’s underlying architectural structure of diagnosis and resolution, showing both simple and complex configurations of symptoms and solution methods. These configurations are in part constrained by the nature of the technical problem; but they are also the consequence of design decisions. Understanding structure enables us to meaningfully classify the very diverse instances of this genre, reveals key design issues, and is apt to contribute to experimental research insofar as structure is central to many of the most useful research questions we can ask.

In general, numbered section heads use the chapter number as the first digit – but that’s only if you have multiple chapters in a book (1.1, 2.1, 3.1…).

What if you have only one chapter in a book? Do the sections become 1, 2, 3…?

I haven’t been able to find anything discussing this, so if you know of any reference material to back this up, I’d be much obliged!

The Readability Report tool scores your document for readability, cohesion and information density. These scores provide the author with an indication of how well the intended audience will understand the text. The scores use a variety of computational linguistic techniques to determine the reading level of the text.

If you are unfamiliar with the licenses promoted by Creative Commons (CC), you might be taken in by these claims, but they are not true. Lawrence Lessig, cofounder and board member of CC (his day job is Harvard Law School professor and director of the Safra Center for Ethics) explains the situation in this article. In brief, what CC promotes is choice for creators of works (writers, musicians, artists), using more flexible variations on copyright license terms.

Sarah explained the advantages to both the customers and the company of involving readers (users) and discussed some of the techniques that Atlassian has been experimenting with. These include social media (blogs, a forum, and Twitter), a “doc sprint” (an intensive time spent producing documents such as tutorials), encouraging users to update community documentation on a wiki, links to readers’ blogs, and an interactive game that customers can use to help them through the complex installation and configuration of a product.

Anyone who has worked in both a traditional “waterfall” development environment and an agile environment, knows how different they are. If you are comfortable working in one, you may be quite uncomfortable in the other… or you may not, depending on your adaptabiity and tolerance for change. Personally, I thrive on change (or at least variety).

During my time at IBM, I worked on “waterfall” projects, which I found a bit stifling. Now I work with OpenOffice.org, which may or may not be “agile” but certainly is fast-paced in terms of iterative changes to the software. The user documentation team as a group (all volunteers) is always lagging behind the software developers. I suspect a lot of that time lag has to do with our failure to develop processes to handle the workflow, so I’m looking for ways to improve that workflow. Other problems are a lack of enough writers compared to reviewers and editors, and a constanting changing set of volunteers. Engaging volunteers isn’t all that different to engaging readers, and both could help with keeping the documentation up to date and relevant to the users’ needs.

I recommend Sarah Maddox’s blog. Her posts about AODC start here.

Some highlights for me included the talks on structured content and DITA, engaging your readers with the documentation, an overview of Google Apps, user assistance design and implementation for iPhone apps—and the chance to fondle an iPad several weeks before they became available in Australia. I’m now mulling over the possibilities for putting some of what I’ve learned—about both structured authoring and engaging readers—into use at OpenOffice.org.

For details of the speakers and their topics, see speakers page and the agenda pages on the AODC website. The speakers are regulars at AODC as well as WritersUA and similar conferences, with new material every year, presented in an entertaining manner.

I am not going to attempt to summarise the sessions, though I’ll mention some topics of particular interest to me in subsequent blog posts.