In open source, all sorts of interesting connections happen. In open source documentation, an even more narrowly defined group of folks connect the dots for others. Recently I was interviewed by Mirantis, an OpenStack services startup, about my involvement with OpenStack documentation. They’re doing a series of interviews with the technical leads in OpenStack. We had a good time talking, and here’s an excerpt with a link to the full interview. I wanted to share it for my readers to see my open source views as a snapshot.
Mirantis: Can you please introduce yourself?
Anne Gentle: I work on OpenStack documentation full time at Rackspace, and I actually was the second hire Rackspace did for the OpenStack project. It was the greatest match I could ever wish for. I wrote a book in 2009 about how to do community collaborative documentation, and I had volunteered a lot with open source docs projects. This job showed up in my backyard in Austin, Texas, and I just jumped at it.
Q: What is the major difference between open source and closed source documentation?
A: The first big difference is interest in open-ness everywhere, from authoring to publishing to display. I was even asked if all of our fonts are open source in the first few weeks I started! Our toolchain is open to anyone to author with or tinker and re-use themselves. The second difference is in licensing. In a closed source environment, the documentation is very legally bound to provide a certain service-level or billing agreement. The idea behind open collaborative docs is that anyone can edit them and, in some communities, the ethos is very involved in the attribution of content. That’s a really good case for creative commons licenses.
So there’s a whole range, but a lot of it is around licensing and the freedom of the content, I also believe there’s a lot of interesting innovation going on in open source. For many of the same reasons you would do open source coding, I think there’s a similar draw for open source docs.
Q: What makes open source documentation so special?
A: There is a need to have a lot of discipline around documentation, and open source surprisingly lends itself to that. Open source, especially projects that try to tie docs to code as much as possible, are actually going to be very disciplined in their processes. Read more…