I am back in Vegas after the awesome Open Help conference in Cincinnatti. This was my 1) first time in Cincinnatti 2) first time meeting any GNOME people in person 3) first non-science conference 4) first hackfest. Everything I experienced confirmed my growing conviction: the Open Source community is full of awesome people and I want to be part of it for a long time to come. I thought I'd do a rundown of the talks today and then a review of the hackfest in the next post. http://www.slideshare.net/event/open-help-conference-2011 is a nice SlideShare page for the event. SlideShare is a new tool for me, but it allows you to submit and share your presentation slides and notes for an event collaboratively.

The first talk was by Anne Gentle, entitled “Sprints and Stacks – Building a Documentation Community”. I think this was a great introductory talk for this conference, as it was the first “Open Help” conference ever (as far as I know). Anne's talk was very comprehensive when it came to establishing, improving and growing a docs community. It made me inspired and excited to be a part of the documentation process for GNOME. Another thing she talked about was documentation sprints, which I believe we refer to as hackfests. :) Either way, the principle is the same. Get your team together, time it right, and work work work! (With the added support of others' physical presence, of course.)

Next up was Dave Robbins of GE with quite a different perspective on docs that I have never stopped to think about. His “Remember the User!” talk grounded in reality some of the nebulous things that a technical writer may not think of when knee-deep in software documentation. One of the most interesting things he described was how he documents a complex industrial machine for a relatively non-techie target audience. These workers do not have much time to learn a new system, and there is a high turnover rate. Things like the inclusion of video and the physical placement of the documentation are factors that certainly vary based on the target audience and the product being documented, and may not apply as much to some software. Considering why they are needed, however, could be quite enlightening.

The third speaker was Dru Lavigne on the process of “Starting an Open Source Certification Program”. This talk was a little more difficult for me to connect with, as I had never even considered the fact that certification was something mere mortals could start. (In my mind, certs are MCSEs, CCNAs, A+...big names from big corporations that would likely have nothing to do with Open Source or Free Software. Then again, I did not know until this conference that Red Hat was so dedicated to Open Source software, and they are HUGE.) Anyway, the one thing that came through loud and clear was: it is very very difficult. It requires quite a bit of money, effort, resources, and time. Some interesting facets of the endeavour are psychometrics, “the science of assessment”, and what it takes to write questions for exams. (No “none of the above”!)

After a delicious lunch, the next talk was by Janet Swisher of Mozilla: “Engaging developers in Mozilla's documentation”. I have used Mozilla's products for years. I started using Netscape Communicator in 1997 or so (mostly to update my Geocities page with animated .gifs of kitties...) and have used and recommended it to others in various forms since then. It was interesting seeing the evolution of the Mozilla team as well as what they are doing today. This was an interesting peek into something I have yet to do with GNOME: communicate with developers about the product being documented. I was surprised at how hands-off some developers seem to be once their software is released into the wild, though the challenge of documenting them is nowhere near insurmountable.

The next talk was by Jennifer Zickerman, also of Mozilla (Thunderbird, the email program). She spoke about “Coordinating Documentation and Support: Turning Complaints into Contributions”. She gave a very good overview of the challenges and requirements in developing a strong Open Source documentation team. One fact about the Thunderbird team that I was amazed by was their user:contributer ratio. They have 10 employees, 50 contributers, and 10,000,000 users (give or take a couple million). One way they deal with this is the “Army of Awesome”: a never-ending feed of Twitter users referencing Mozilla products, with varying levels of praise, animosity, and vulgarity. Aspiring documentarians and support people can easily contribute by dipping into the stream and replying to individual users with advice. It's a great first step towards contribution.

Next up was my GOPW mentor, Shaun McCance. His work with the xml-based markup language Mallard is allowing for a new framework for user help in GNOME to be developed which is more lightweight and flexible than the outdated DocBook. It is topic-oriented and uses conditional processing; the upshot is that you can have a “table of contents” called a “guide page” which keeps itself current as documents are added, edited, and removed. My work in the internship thus far has been about writing in Mallard for GNOME Desktop Help, but I am quite interested in getting involved in plugins or extensions that use it as well as contributing to the official GNOME help app, yelp. In any case, Shaun gave a brief history of Mallard and yelp development (including a bit of insight into the reaction of some GNOME community members on the release of Ubuntu's Unity).

Lastly, Lana Brindley spoke about her work at Red Hat in “Open Source Documentation in Four Easy Steps (and one slightly more difficult one)”. Her talk covered a lot of ground, some of which I'm still catching up with now. One thing she mentioned was DITA, the “Darwin Information Typing Architecture”. It is a data model (kind of a framework) for writing and publishing that is XML based. It is far too complex for me to cover here; however one essential piece of it is the “Concept, Task, Reference” paradigm used in writing docs. This way of looking at things can be applied in writing for GNOME Docs, so I'm looking at it with interest. As her talk continued, I found myself in way over my head (except for the Skynet references) so I'm going to cut it short rather than botch it. The steps mentioned in the title, however, were as follows: 1) Process is king. 2) Get the right tools. 3) Keep it open. 4) Keep it real. 5) Review constantly. Sounds reasonable to me!

The next day of the conference (Sunday) we had some fascinating talks on a huge range of subjects from gamification to recruiting new contributors to the principles, basics, and goals of Open Help. One highlight for me was when Dave Robbins, who was installing Ubuntu on his laptop for the first time as we sat there, asked the room: “Why should I use Open Source?” The room exploded. Everyone has something to say on this topic and has thought about it, written about it, and talked about it for years. As things quieted down, a few key contributors spoke eloquently to the question, bringing in experience, insight, and perspective from all quarters. I hope there is a video of the talk, as I'd like to hear some of the replies again. In the end, Dave announced that he was running Gnome 3 on Ubuntu...and we all cheered. There is nothing quite so encouraging as a real-life example to show you that you aren't shouting against the wind. Next time: Hackfest!!

Oh, and before I forget, I tried to make a list of all books mentioned by speakers at the conference as well as some written by speakers but not mentioned. If I've missed anything vital or relevant, please let me know and I will add it right away.