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Advancing the Project and Community

The beauty of FLOSS (Free as in Livre [Freedom] Open Source Software) is the community of creative people involved in the FLOSS movement. They are faced with the same challenges as we face. Likewise, there are many creative and innovative solutions. Now more than ever, it is important to support one another in promoting FLOSS tools to encourage freedom of choice.

The common challenge is to create useful FLOSS documentation in a timely manner. The documentation must be continually updated as the software and projects evolve. It must be simple to understand yet comprehensive. The documentation must be easily translated into dozens of languages. It must be easily revised and distributed in a variety of display and publishing formats (HTML, PDF, PostScript, etc.).

The entire FLOSS community will benefit from a completely "free as in freedom" tool chain for creating, distributing, storing, and publishing FLOSS documents/content.

FLOSS Docs the FLOSS Way

A completely free (as in freedom) and automated toolchain would be of tremendous benefit to the Fedora Project as well as the FOSS community-at-large. To realize this goal, we are proposing an online FLOSS Documentation Tools Summit tentatively planned for the Spring of 2007.

In preparation for this event, we need to:

  • Prepare an agenda for the summit
  • Put together a contact list of possible participants from other FLOSS projects
  • Publicize the event in the FLOSS community

Meanwhile, we also plan to:

  • Review what are the common FLOSS tools and techniques in use today [the real]
  • Map out the best documentation workflow [the ideal]
  • Identify the gaps and how best to fill them [how to get there from here]

We hope to arrive at a community-wide consensus on the best way to proceed.

Preliminary Questions

However, before we get too far down this route, we need to answer some key questions internally:

1. How do we want to interact with other content sharing with upstream? 2. What is the nature of what we want to house (be upstream) in the Fedora Project?

  • Artwork, branding, trademarks
  • Distro specific layer on top of any common documents

3. What do we want to support as the Fedora project for work going upstream?

  • man/info
  • /usr/share/doc/*
  • Javadoc, doxygen, etc.
  • Other?

4. How do we want to get content moving from "here" to "there"?

  • Individual accounts in various systems? (*ick*)
  • Through Fedora developers? (better)
  • Similar to Fedora Translation now?
  • Automagically? (best)

5. What about common toolchains? Can we get XML or XHTML from everyone and some ability to share content?

  • Licensing issues
  • SCM and/or
  • CMS

6. Other? Anyone? Bueller?

Other Related Topics For Discussion

  1. Upstream contribution to other documentation projects (for example, GNOME).
  2. Improvements to document conversion tools.
  3. Better communication (VoIP, online presence tools like MugShot)
  4. Cross-stream collaboration, working with documentation teams from other projects (such as other distributions and upstream projects) to create or contribute to a documentation commons.
  5. Offline wiki editing, such as using Gedit with the "Tag Lines" plugin. Any popular editor can also be used, as long as tagline features exist or can be easily added.
  6. Offline DocBook editing. See DocBook Authoring Tools .
  7. OpenOffice.org and DocBook. See OOoDocBook and OpenOffice and DocBook .
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