New Doc Volunteer

[Famiglietti, Andrew A]

Hi Open Office Doc Team,


I'm a professor in the English Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and I'm planning to use Open Source Software documentation as a "real world" writing task for my Technical Writing Students this semester. I noticed your project was looking for documentation help and thought I would reach out. Some things you should know:


- I'm not going to swamp you with student contributions. Students will file their drafts with me, first, and then I will pass them on to you only if I think they have a reasonably good end product, and I have an ok from the project?


I was wondering:


- If you would be interested in seeing the documentation drafts students produce

- If there was any particular area of documentation you were particularly in need of


Thanks so much for your time!




---
Andy Famiglietti, PhD
Assistant Professor of English, West Chester University
http://copyvillain.org<http://copyvillain.org/>

[Dave]

Dear Andrew,

over a period of seven years (14 university terms) I developed a
documentation specially aimed at students, though not students in science
courses. It is available in five languages so far, I myself did the German,
English and French versions. It includes an online exercise, though I
myself did a live introductory course (in my last batch it was altogether
14 groups of around 20 to 30 students, two or three per pc). In the first
hour or so I did just a little bit of theory (what is a book?), then
demonstrated the parallels between between book production without
computers and that with computers. In the second hour they would repeat the
exercise two or three or even four students together round one pc, and I
would just stand around in the background in case they got stuck somewhere.
The exercise was over time so explicit though, that mostly they got along
without my help. Would be pleased, if you might take a look at it:

http://openoffice-uni.org/

Yours
Dave

Post by Famiglietti, Andrew A
Hi Open Office Doc Team,
I'm a professor in the English Department at West Chester University of
Pennsylvania, and I'm planning to use Open Source Software documentation as
a "real world" writing task for my Technical Writing Students this
semester. I noticed your project was looking for documentation help and
- I'm not going to swamp you with student contributions. Students will
file their drafts with me, first, and then I will pass them on to you only
if I think they have a reasonably good end product, and I have an ok from
the project?
- If you would be interested in seeing the documentation drafts students produce
- If there was any particular area of documentation you were particularly in need of
Thanks so much for your time!
---
Andy Famiglietti, PhD
Assistant Professor of English, West Chester University
http://copyvillain.org<http://copyvillain.org/>

[Keith N. McKenna]

Post by Famiglietti, Andrew A
Hi Open Office Doc Team,
- I'm not going to swamp you with student contributions. Students will file their drafts with me, first, and then I will pass them on to you only if I think they have a reasonably good end product, and I have an ok from the project?
- If you would be interested in seeing the documentation drafts students produce
- If there was any particular area of documentation you were particularly in need of
Thanks so much for your time!
---
Andy Famiglietti, PhD
Assistant Professor of English, West Chester University
http://copyvillain.org<http://copyvillain.org/>

Professor Famiglietti;

First let me apologize for taking so long to reply to your message.
Things in my personal life have been such that I have not had as much
time as I would like to spend with Apache OpenOffice.

The current state of the documentation effort is that it is at a
standstill. A decision was made around the end of 2012, beginning of
2013 that new documentation would be started on the Apache OpenOffice
Media-Wiki under the Apache License, Version 2.0. This effort has
stalled due to the lack of experienced technical writers to guide and
mentor new volunteers.

The idea was to have documentation structured for on-line viewing using
liberal hyper-links to guide people from the generic to the specific
rather than separate detailed guides for each separate Application
within the suite. This structure does not lend itself well to the flow
that you describe but I would be willing to take the output from
students that you approve and format it for inclusion into the wiki.

I would also be interested in discussing further with you any other
insights or ideas that you might have to move the documentation effort
forward again.

Regards
Keith N. McKenna