Upcoming presentations in Austin and Houston

I’ll be presenting Documentation as Conversation at the Austin STC meeting Tuesday October 7th.

Austin When

Tuesday October 7th
6:00 - 6:30 PM: Networking
6:30 - 7:30 PM: Program
7:45 - 9:00 PM: Networking dinner

Austin Where

UT Commons Center - Room 1.138 [Map]

Then in November I’m going to make the trip to the Houston STC Meeting Tuesday November 11th.

Documentation as Conversation: Working conversation and community into documentation using social technologies

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well, play with technology at home, or learn something new in a classroom setting.

Instead of concentrating on single sourcing or the tools of the trade, this talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, perhaps with the help of some social networking applications. I’ll also discuss the in-person FLOSS Manuals BookSprint as a use of a wiki paired with a community event to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals for free, open source software projects.

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XO BookSprint instructions

Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals wrote up these instructions for how to get involved with the BookSprint going on this week. I’m hoping to write blog entries that describe the planning sessions and surrounding practical advice for this type of writing sprint, but I wanted to let my readers know the basic overview of how to participate this very week. Thanks Adam Hyde! Adam’s presenting at DocTrain East this fall, if you’d like to know more about FLOSS Manuals and the remixing the system enables.

XO BookSprint

This week in Austin, Texas a team of writers are gathering together to immerse themselves in a one week intensive documentation jam.

The purpose of the Book Sprint is to produce documentation in 1 week to support the forthcoming 2008 roll-out off the OLPC G1G1. The team in Austin consists of members of FLOSS Manuals (Adam Hyde, Anne Gentle), OLPC (Adam Holt), Sugar (David Farning, Walter Bender), and the Austin XO Users Group, and YOU! We have set up the online tools so you too can contribute! To make a contribution please do the following :

1. Register
To contribute to the documentation you can register at FLOSS Manuals :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/register

2. Contribute!
There are several manuals planned to be finished by the end of the week
(August 29) including a Sugar manual, an XO manual, and 5 Sugar
Activities manuals.  You can see the structure of the manuals here:
Sugar :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar

XO (OLPC Hardware) :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/XO

Sugar Activities :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Browse
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Chat
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Record
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Terminal
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Write

To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter
to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button!
Its as simple as that.

Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding
images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more
chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you
just need to know how to write.

If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then join the
chat room listed above and ask us! We look forward to your contribution!

For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also wish to read
our manual :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals

3. Chat
Its a good idea to talk with us so we can help co-ordinate all
contributions. We have a chat room for this using Internet Relay Chat
(IRC). If you know how to use IRC you can connect to the following :
server : irc.freenode.net
channel : #olpc-content

If you do not know how to use IRC then visit the following web based
chat software in your browser :
http://irc.flossmanuals.net/

Information on how to use this web based chat software is here :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/IRC

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