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hmmhmmPosted Oct 1, 2008 18:04 UTC (Wed) by wilck (subscriber, #29844)Parent article: User manuals for free software
How would this be any better than tldp.org?
At first sight, the stuff at flossmanuals is basic - very, very basic.
Look at the openoffice.org "documentation" on flossmanuals. It explains what word processing and spreadsheets are. How many people out there need to be taught that? There probably are some, but how high are the odds that they know about the flossmanuals web site and how to read it?
There is plenty of basic documentation (GNOME and KDE), and there is plenty of high-level docs (man pages) for most packages. What's missing is the mid level, stuff that helps people between the "absolute newbie" and "guru" levels. And speaking about tldp, there are too many outdated manuals and HOWTOs around. The worst problem nowadays is that if you search the web for a problem, you are likely to find hundreds of links to outdated, often even misleading or wrong information.
What's the point in creating a new portal? Why not just improve the existing portals by adding and updating information?
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hmm Posted Oct 2, 2008 13:20 UTC (Thu) by adamhyde (guest, #54469) [Link]
I think many 'advanced users' don't believe that there are others that need more information than they would need to learn something. For example, there are plenty of people in the advanced western economies that do not know what an operating system is. This might surprise you, and many of the readers of lwn.net, however I have listened many times to very smart people talk about how they use a computer and it is clear many do not understand the relationship between the software they use and the operating system they use. They see it all as more or less 'the computer'.
Once you get outside these wealthy nations the situation changes dramatically of course. There are many people in the world that are encountering a computer for the first time via the OLPC project (amongst others). More still that will never see a computer in their lifetime.
My point is, there is a sliding scale of understanding about computers. If we wish to bring people into the sphere of free software then we have to realise that the largest potential market, and the nearest to conversion, is the average user - one that might know what 'online music' is, but doesn't know an 'audio file' from an 'mp3'. The free software sector has to talk to these people in a way they understand if we really want to see free software on every desktop.
hmm Posted Oct 2, 2008 13:41 UTC (Thu) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]
Sure, some people need to learn basics. I spent ours trying to teach my mom how to move a mouse. But again my question: How would such a person know about "flossmanuals.org"?
And then... people without any clue will usually have a person (teacher, coach) who explains their new device to them. These people will teach them what you can do with a word processor or spreadsheet. From my experience, children understand these things extremely quickly - once it has been explained to them, they won't need to reread the lesson on flossmanuals.
What we really need is teachers and coaches who tell people about "word processors" "spreadheets" and "presentations" rather than "Word", "Excel", and "Powerpoint". It's really unfortunate that these MS products have become synonyms for their respective functionality in everyday language.
What we need even more is professional-grade documentation covering the gap between OLPC children and freaks who read the source. We need that documentation in many languages on the same level of readability and accuracy as in English.
I recently tried to find a good, comprehensive tutorial on writing Openoffice.org macros. Still didn't find anything (I recall an article in a German Linux magazine some time ago, or do I need to buy a book?). If I had looked for Excel Macro tutorials, I'd found a dozen immediately.
hmm Posted Oct 2, 2008 14:38 UTC (Thu) by adamhyde (guest, #54469) [Link]
Well FLOSS Manuals provides books too. Our aim is to get to as many people as we can. One method is to have books available in Book Stores as these are excellent promotional avenues.
Since you mention OLPC and how to bridge the gap I thought you might be interested in this:
Its the sugar manual we have made in FLOSS Manuals which covers how to use the Sugar desktop on the OLPC. It includes chapters on using a terminal, basic python etc...this is one example of how documentation can help bridge this gap. This manual is also available completely free here:
hmm Posted Oct 3, 2008 15:30 UTC (Fri) by jmswisher (guest, #54501) [Link]
> At first sight, the stuff at flossmanuals is basic - very, very basic.
> What's the point in creating a new portal? Why not just improve the existing portals by adding and updating information?
A lot of the documents at flossmanuals, like for openoffice.org, are placeholders to show what is possible, rather than being "the" documentation for a project. I agree there is no point in duplicating effort for projects like OOo that already have robust documentation sub-projects.
Readers don't need to know about flossmanuals.net, because it provides hooks so that you can feed a document to your own website. So you can use flossmanuals on the backend to edit your docs, and the updates automatically show up on your project website.
The point in creating a new portal is to create a platform that makes it easy to create documentation for a project that doesn't have any. In the open source world, there are a lot of technologies in use for documentation, which tend to be challenging for either writers (LaTeX, DocBook) or readers (ad-hoc wikis) or both. FLOSS Manuals provides a technical infrastructure that is easy for writers to contribute to (you don't even need to use HTML), and supports documentation structures (books with chapters) that are familiar to readers.
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