Let the community solve your open source documentation problems
Those of us in Open Source often run across great technology that would be of great benefit to the computing masses but somehow never takes hold or even gets tried by people. There are many reasons for the failure of these technologies including installation difficulty, poor user interface, lack of support, lack of awareness, and one that most people think of instantly; poor documentation. I am currently attending an open source conference where the issue of documentation was raised as a critical part of the project success. However, the discussion was not on creating formal user guide type of documentation as we are familiar with but instead creating a social network approach to documentation allowing users to find the answers they need regardless of where they look. For example, many people tend to just search for the help they need with a product today instead of going to the web site of the parent company and looking for documentation. The results of their search takes them to independent blogs, how-to websites, and other locations not necessarily controlled by the company making or supporting the product. This new methodology for product support or documentation may be the answer for open source projects lacking in formal documents. As the trend moves away from formal docs to blogs, wikis, etc – which open source is already familiar with and actively uses, the poor documentation reason for project failure becomes removed. I believe that open source communities should focus on aggregation of information instead of formal document creation to ensure that a social network of solutions for their products appears. To demonstrate this social networking documentation in action, I decided to try and find a solution to a problem I have on my iPhone without using Apple documentation.Problem: Turn off ringer on iPhone 4Search: I searched “iphone4 turn off ringer” with Google and found plenty of results from sites such as: ipod.about.comIn fact, the apple support site was the 8th item on my results list which shows that social networking documentation is already in place today.
www.ehow.com
www.askmefast.com
getsatisfaction.com
www.scribd.com
So, do you agree that formal documentation is on its way out being replaced by social networking documentation? Can this be the solution to the never ending open source documentation problem? Looking forward to your thoughts.
