Writing Openly; Open Source Documentation Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2015

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People often complain about the quality of open source project documentation. At the same time, documentation is a great place to get started contributing to an open source community.

This miniconf will explore practical aspects of Open Source documentation, with an eye to applying them right away.

We will look at:

  • popular markup languages (Docbook, DITA, markdown, etc)
  • version control systems for writers (SVN, git, etc)
  • getting started as a contributor (how to pick a project, getting an account, meeting the community, your first commit, etc)
  • documentation skills and methodologies (topic-based authoring, single sourcing, minimalism, etc)

We'll then be able to start contributing documentation. The pacing of this session will be largely driven by participant interest. It might be that we fly through the concepts straight to a frenetic docs hack fest. It might be that we get a lively argument about the best markup language, or whether minimalism is all hype.

Tim Hildred was a technical writer at Red Hat. Before that a barista at the Linuxcaffe in Toronto