Just in Time Documentation
Increasingly, timeframes for producing documentation and training for computer software are diminishing--often due to new software development methodologies driving rapid development and change. Open source software development is one of these methodologies that democratizes the development process, in that anyone can make a change to open source code. Erik Berglund, in his paper "Open-Source Documentation: In Search of User-Driven, Just-in-Time Writing" suggests that a similar democratic process can and should be applied to documentation development. The result, he believes, will be faster development with a focus on the questions that users want the answers to NOW! Read the article at http://xml.coverpages.org/DITA-Berglund2001.pdf.
My one reservation about the article is Erik's emphasis on using single-source solutions with authoring languages such as XML and HTML. Single source solutions apply in corporations that have committed considerable resources to single source, but many have not and will not. A key requirement of the open source model is building a critical mass of users that are willing to contribute content. Requiring knowledge of authoring languages seriously reduces that base.
I believe using wiki and similar technologies that require no programming experience will truly democratize documentation and help establish the critical mass needed. --David Orr
posted by David Orr @ 10:50 AM
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1 Comments:
To me, single source is critical for any larger scale project. The ability to easily refactor and reuse content applies to documentation in the same way that the ability to leverage code libraries and refactor algorithms from open source code applies to programming.
But single source is not incompatible with distributed community-oriented technologies like wikis. Many wikis are already a limited type of single source, since many like MediaWiki use a custom markup language whose output could be just as easily refactored into a PDF as a web page.
I think it would be highly valuable to have a wiki that allowed easy XML tagging of content, maybe even enforced it. Especially if the wiki was designed so that different XML schemas could be plugged in for different purposes, like documentation.
As the semantic web grows in impact, we'll no doubt see a wiki with these capabilities, and then single source documentation development over a wiki could become a reality.
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