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Posts Tagged ‘XO’
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
How do people converse about technical topics today?
I have seen the eminent reinvention of technical documentation as we know it, which inspired me to begin chronicling my own observations and shifts in the field of communicating technical topics through conversation.
One such revealing moment happened while I was working on documentation for the One Laptop Per Child project on their wiki at wiki.laptop.org. The Give One Get One rollout was hurtling towards the organization, and they had not completely designed a support system nor did they have a user manual ready to view online or to print. The Give One Get One program gave the opportunity for the first time for anyone in the U.S to buy a laptop and know that one additional laptop would be sent to another country. Through the nearly heroic efforts of one person building a new team self-named the Support Gang, an all-volunteer crew if I understood the situation correctly, a wiki-based Support FAQ came to life and a support email address was created and a support team made of volunteers was staffed.
The amazing revelation to me was that the wiki FAQ could and did answer so many questions because they came from real people, customers of the Give One Get One program. The questions were real questions from real users, so there wasn’t a delay in seeking out a subject matter expert. These were conversations happening on the wiki Edit tab or on the Discuss tab. See the History on wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ for examples of the questions and answers that happened, and also notice the time stamps for some of the answers. The immediacy of the response is practically like an Instant Messaging conversation via the wiki FAQ page.
How did the community completely fill out these highly useful wiki pages? Or did just a few volunteers do it? It was the work of a few good people continuing conversations with real users or potential and upcoming customers of the little laptop. Community-supported email, forums, and IRC discussions rolled into these wiki pages. Supporting users was the work of college students, of parents who were anticipating their laptop’s arrival, and other non-professional writers. One such volunteer was Katie, a mom who is a mathematician by day, and an excellent FAQ writer by night. Her wiki pages and research around the wireless connectivity were extremely helpful to everyone who bought a Give 1 Get 1 laptop. Without her dedication, many of us couldn’t have connected to the Internet, and the user manual I continued to work on benefited greatly from her wiki contributions and knowledge sharing.
That the community created such helpful, useful, readable pages was a complete turnaround for my attitude about what sweat goes into writing and rewriting carefully crafted topics to then submit for review and sweat over again and again until a deadline comes. I thought, instead of toiling over the exact words and following a style guide, should I try to recruit and entice and motivate contributors from every professional or amateur background possible? Some paranoid types say that laymen and amateur writers could beat us at our own chosen profession. But “beat” is not the right term. It’s not a contest or an all-out competition, it’s a group effort towards a shared goal.
Armed with this revelation, I began studying how conversations and community attract the right combination of content and information to offer the right amount of technical communication delivered in the right manner. Part of my study involved hands-on creation of end-user documentation, including a PDF manual, using the OLPC community’s wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide, and also using a highly customized wiki engine at FLOSS Manuals, www.flossmanuals.net.
Much of the labor and toil on those wiki pages and especially with the community volunteer atmosphere of OLPC and FLOSS Manuals is coming to fruition next week at the FLOSS Manuals BookSprint to document the XO laptop and the Sugar operating system for the students, parents, and teachers benefiting from the One Laptop Per Child project around the world.
BookSprint for Floss Manuals writing for the XO and Sugar
I’ve been busy lately working on plans for a Floss Manuals BookSprint. A BookSprint is a week-long concentrated effort of technical writers getting together to create a manual for free, libre open source software products. BookSprints are like a workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are also a social experience where writers come together to form a community who share common goals and experiences.
Writers are giving a week’s time to be curators of information housed in wikis and websites everywhere, bringing it all together into the FLOSS Manual TWiki implementation to be ready for online viewing or gorgeous print output. If you’re interested in joining us for a day or all week, we’d love to have you. We’re planning to invite local students to the event also.
This picture shows the recent Inkscape BookSprint held in Paris France. We’re planning to hold the XO/Sugar BookSprint here in Austin, but I’m guessing the collection of laptops and cables will be the same here as there!
Inkscape BookSprint in Paris
In this case, we’ll produce a comprehensive manual for the kids, families, and teachers using the little green XO laptop. While the manual that exists at flossmanuals.net/olpc_simple is a targeted effort, it is outdated for the new line drawn between hardware (XO) and operating system (Sugar). Our hope is to expand the manual in advance of the new expanded Give 1 Get 1 program will give educators and children a chance to learn about their laptop, repair it, program with it, and teach others.
What can you do to help? Right now, I’m raising money and asking for in-kind donations to help with this concentrated effort. Here are some ideas, although you can come up with creative ideas yourself if you want!
$500 would provide hotel accommodations for a writer
$250 would provide a catered lunch for all the writers
$100 would provide gas money for many writers all week
Updated to add: You can also directly give donations at http://en.flossmanuals.net/donate.
Sponsorship earns not only good “whuffie” but we’ll list your name or business name on these websites: FLOSS Manuals, JustWriteClick, Sugar Labs, and OLPC.
An exciting aspect of this BookSprint is the international effort behind it. Adam Hyde, founder of Floss Manuals, is planning to make the trek to Austin from Amsterdam, and there’s a French Floss Manuals coordinator working behind the scenes to ensure that the document can be translated to French. I’m also working with Yama Ploskonka, admin of the OLPC-Sur list of Spanish-speaking OLPC supporters to find Spanish language translators.
All in all, this is a very exciting effort and I’d love to get readers of JustWriteClick involved in any way you’d like. I’m very excited to be part of this effort and pleased to play host - let’s gather some more community around the BookSprint to make it a success.
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - Attracting girls to IT
15% of people are from the northeast
15% of people left handed
15% of people in the world have no cell phone, or no Internet
And… less than 15% of computer science majors are female. [1]
This was the lead-in for the panelists and I liked the tie-ins of 15.
Since this session, I have talked to girls around the 12-15 year old range, and I completely agree with all the panelist’s observations about how girls don’t think they’re good at something, especially computers.
In this session I met Ashe Dryden and we talked about BarCamp Austin - she’s an organizer for BarCamp Milwaukee. I asked her to watch my laptop while I got a “pop” and offered to get her one too. I laughed when she asked upon my return, “Where are you from, if you say ‘pop!’” I have lived in Austin seven years, but haven’t let go of my Midwestern roots (Indiana and Ohio), where we say pop for all kinds of soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, and fizzy drink. 
After the session I spoke to Clare Richardson of GirlStart about how the Austin XO user group would like to help out with their projects. One that’s upcoming is the Take IT Global showcase, where they’re working on games for the OLPC project. It sounds like they have enough XOs for their upcoming event, April 26th, which I plan to attend. They’re going to show off the educational game projects that the girls in the GirlStart program have been programming. They’re using a wiki to keep notes, collaborate, do project planning, all for the work they’re doing on their games. It’s great fun to read the game ideas.
Here are my notes from the session.
Clare Richardson - GirlStart in Austin, TX
What class in middle school did you feel smart and confident in?
art, phys ed, math, computer lab?
TechBridge
Free afterschool programs and summer programs.
Role models are key, role model training. Great training document available on their website. I plan to read through it for ideas on taking the XO to classrooms.
Jay Moore MentorNet
Email connection with mentors, 10-15 minutes a week.
Abby Tittizer IBM Extreme Blue
Internship program, not specific to women, for college students.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about girls and technology and getting them interested?
A: Perception is boring and nerdy and you have to already be good at it. Girls have altruistic missions.
Girls don’t think they’re qualified to do something, but boys “just go for it.” girls think that an internship means they already need to know how to do it.
Suggestions:
- Have girls sign up in pairs for a computer class.
- Spend time with your kids teachers and guidance counselors to find out more about their science education, etc.
- Boys tend to have an inflated sense of their own competence.
- UT has a club that has a roadshow that goes out to TX high schools to help recruit.
- They use pair programming in introductory classes.
Updated to add: There’s a great article in the NYTimes that I found through Anne Zelenka’s del.icio.us links called “Sorry, Boys, This is our Domain.” While girls might not be computer science majors, they are excellent bloggers and customizers of all sorts of web and social sites. Quote: “…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).” Girls may have more patience and perseverance to stick to a site that requires content updates.
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative
I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.
I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books - they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.
Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)
For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.
Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.
OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.
Why are open textbooks possible now?
- Convergence of technology and community
- Also XML - lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
- Online lets you go past books
- Intellectual property now has new licensing - creative commons license
- Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
- Lens - gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
- National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses
Print on demand options - if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.
The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.
Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.
What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides
Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org - people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” - what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.
Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.
Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.
Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment - she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape - open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - BarCamp Austin III (BarCampAustin3)
Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.
For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.
The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.
Getting to Idea City
(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)
The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.
Getting into BarCamp
Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.
Hugging the XO
In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.
I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.
I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.
I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:
To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY
scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc
To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:
scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./
We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.
People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.
I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.
Summing it up
This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.
My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.
SXSW Interactive starts today - pack your XO
So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least sched.org lets me select more than one session at a time. Such an awesomely simple interface and login is so quick, just an email address and a password and you’re scheduling in no time.
I’ve also put an invite out on upcoming.org to anyone who wants to meet with other XO users to come to Las Manitas for a late Sunday lunch. Thanks tantek for the photo.
Austin, Texas - XO on the menu for lunch
Our three XOs in a row
We got the two other XO buyers that I know of in Austin for lunch last week - buyers of the One Laptop Per Child computer, called the XO laptop. Whurley and Mikus and I met at Berryhill Baja Grill, where indeed, wireless access was present. My XO was able to connect, but for some reason Whurley’s did not. And Mikus had hacked his network configuration to use a USB-Ethernet adapter cable, so his wireless wasn’t working. We thought that Whurley’s machine would be able to “mesh” with mine to get a connection, but that wasn’t the case. Even in the Group View I couldn’t see the other XOs sitting right next to me. Pout.
Still, we got to compare colors (look at the variety!), try out the Distance Activity (it didn’t work, and it’s not acoustic, we are not fooled), and Meebo worked like a charm on my XO. So all in all, a fun time! I think one of the Linux Austin groups got their XOs together recently, and we’re going to try to get together again, so stay tuned. Rumor has it that 30 XOs were purchased in the Austin area, so hopefully we can get them together and see what we can do.
I’ll report more later this week when I show Turtle Art and Tam Tam Jam to the four-year-olds in my son’s preschool class. Wish me luck giving a demo to a bunch of four-year-olds!
XO doc and the journey to wiki-fied documentation
Just wanted to give another update on the happenings in the end-user doc front from my neck of the woods. (Idioms sprinkled throughout!)
I got an HTML copy to SJ and a second copy with an Index and some customizations on the CSS. I tested it on an XO emulation and the Browse Activity does really well with the Index and search so I’m pleased with the results.
http://www.mooseworld.org/olpc/index.htm
Here’s what it looks like when you view it on an XO in the Browse Activity (click on the image to see it full-sized).
I’ve written a letter of appreciation to Author-it for giving us the license and ability to do quick rearranging. It’s coming in handy.
Adam Hyde of FlossManuals.net and I met to talk about a migration path for the kids end-user doc content at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide. They’ve just finished a lot of translation work so that we can also have multiple language versions of the simple user guide on the FM site and translators could work in a side-by-side view which is nice. The next steps are for me to re-arrange the content in Author-it into an outline closer to the structure that FM uses (Introduction, Installing, Interface, Tutorials, Appendices). Once I get the new structure to the content, Adam and I and anyone else who wants to pitch in can do copy and paste of the HTML into the FM pages. Adam’s filling out the infrastructure on FM now here:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/OLPC_simple/WebHome
From Adam I learned that the formatting of the print versions out of the Floss Manuals wiki uses Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/. It’s an open source page layout and publishing tool.
Also, I have had a few people contact me this week to see how they can help so I’ve sent them the information about the different groups for the different user guides from the wiki.laptop.org/go/Manuals page. Here are the basics for how to help.
- Join the Library list at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library where documentation discussions occur.
- Sign up for an OLPC wiki account at wiki.laptop.org.
- Download and install an emulator. (optional, but helpful) QEMU is an open source processor emulator that can emulate an entire PC, including its peripheral devices like the disk, display, network, and so on. You must download and install this package to emulate the XO laptop.
- Become familiar with the Simplified User Guide at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide and read about the audiences at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manual.
- Feel free to edit or start a new page with a new audience in mind. Note that we are porting the kids manual to Flossmanuals.net so also become familiar with their structure.
I’ve also started an Educator’s Guide at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators_guide . I am way out of my league writing about constructivism and intervention guides (lesson plans) but I figure I have to start somewhere. I also want to link to as many additional reading materials about constructivism and how to teach with that learning theory in the forefront. There’s a nice post over at OLPC News that has great reading materials and ideas for accessories. I’ll also study the http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_activity_ideas page as well.
I still have some edits that I need to do to the Simplified user guide wiki page, and I really want to re-write the interface instructions (or someone else could if they are feeling energetic.) I recently re-wrote the instructions for installing a new activity with screenshots from Update.1 for each. So I’m now able to run Update.1 in my emulation environment.
I’m also working with people who have worked on the artwork. There are some talented artists giving their time to the project.
The journey to Floss Manuals is going to be interesting for several reasons. One is, which wiki is source? Floss Manuals or wiki.laptop.org? Adam and I will likely have to get notifications on each wiki and attempt to keep them synced. I’m also trying to design for re-use because it’s easy to remix manuals in Floss Manuals. So there should be a way to use content from the simplifed user guide where kids are the audience for the teacher or instructor’s guide. The translation workflow in Floss Manuals lets the translator view both text side by side, which will be helpful I believe, but there’s no translation memory.
Another observation - my perception is that OLPC really wants the wiki.laptop.org to be the single place to get information. A recent status update encouraged the developers to make sure their Activity wiki pages are clean, neat, up-to-date, and accurate. However, there is a nice set of topics at laptop.org/start that the Give1Get1 participants are pointed to in the letter they receive when opening their XO laptop box. (Thanks to whurley for posting his xo unboxing photos on flickr.)
Since I think it is a good idea to have these separate pages, my perception is that there is definitely a limit to what the wiki can do for the general public (although I would qualify that statement by saying that most XO participants are not the general public.) The laptop.org/start pages are an excellent design and clearly written with an easy-to-use navigation system. I’d love to find out the page hits and find out if there’s any way to measure effectiveness of those pages versus the wiki pages (or the wiki as a whole).
The Rockley Blog - wiki’s delivery mechanisms
I’m thoroughly enjoying the new Rockley Blog at http://rockley.com/blog/. I’m so glad Steve Manning and Ann Rockley are blogging, especially about wikis.
I appreciated Steve’s post “Wikis for Documentation” especially where he says that the delivery side is the weak point still. Agreed, but I have seen pockets of improvement there and need to be blogging heartily about them.
About three years ago I was equally as unconvinced of a wikis usefulness for end-user doc. An Agile-advocating developer mentioned the idea of using wikis so that the end-user doc could stay in sync with their fast Agile iterations. Yipes I thought! Wikis did work well for convincing the developers to contribute their knowledge, though, and internally they became a useful knowledge sharing (and finding) system.
Now I’m starting to see more and more actual customer need for them. I just had a great discussion about the difference between what a customer needs and what a customer thinks he or she wants, though, so some of what’s necessary is interpreting whether a wiki can fulfill a customer need. I got a small chuckle out of the title of this blog entry - Wikify Documentum Already - but he’s talking precisely about the gains you and your customers make when documentation is in a wiki. The interesting momentum going now is whether the current large enterprise content management systems can start to see the value in a wiki output, or whether the wiki engine providers themselves are going to catch up with the full feature set available in the large enterprise systems.
But wow, I’m learning how difficult wiki maintenance and trust patterns can be while using the wiki.laptop.org site to help out with their end-user doc. In some ways, wiki doc is more difficult than using the real CMS tools that we’ve become accustomed to (read: spoiled by). But I’m also learning how amazing the collaboration opportunities are when using a wiki. I’m still marveling at the communication going on in the discussion pages as well as the volunteer spirit that has come through a request on an art network.
So, what to do to get decent output for content delivery using the multiple channels that us advanced single-sourcers are already accustomed to? I’m planning to move the XO’s end-user doc towards the Flossmanuals.net model of a highly customized Twiki implementation where you can get and print a PDF from the wiki. I can’t wait to learn more and I’ll blog about it as I find out. It’s a step in that direction, though, where you deliver user guides and online help and web sites tailored to the needs of specific audiences. Language translations in a highly distributed environment are going to be an important part of the project, and I’m curious about how Flossmanuals provides for that aspect. 
I’ve learned that you can write a Confluence plug-in that will take DITA source and turn it into wiki text. Confluence has PDF output capability as well, so it’s another step in the right direction to get that just-in-time content delivery that a customer needs (but doesn’t know that they want.)
Putting documentation in a wiki (or any really-well-indexed web location, really) can increase findability. If you get internal comments that say “you haven’t documented this particular feature enough” and you feel the feature is sufficiently documented, examine the findability of your documentation.
Also in our user advocacy role we are learning how to listen to customers and then interpret their needs. As information acquisition continues to gather speed, we not only provide the information but should also make informed choices about delivery methods.
Examples of what a customer wants but might not know that a wiki can deliver:
- What’s new with the product?
- How do I interact with documentation, support, the company represented as an actual live person?
- I want immediate information updates.
- I want to discuss the nuances of an implementation decision.
- I need to find others who are attempting what I am in the same type of field (insurance or banking).
What are your thoughts? Are we spoiled by our advanced delivery systems and waiting for wiki engines to catch up? Or are wiki authoring and delivery systems already giving us collaborative opportunities that are unparalleled?
