atw: New Co-Lead of OpenOffice.org Documentation

Howard Silcock wrote:
> I'm not sure that I get the picture here. Have you been the only
> writer to stick around for a significant time on this project? Since
> you're now a co-lead, I'd assume there must have been at least one
> other.
>
> As you may gather, I know next to nothing about how OpenOffice works,
> as a project.
>
> But it seems to me you need a full-time recruiter!
With the exception of 2 or 3 Sun employees, who appear to be mainly involved with the online help, or the developer-oriented docs, everyone at Documentation is a volunteer. There are many volunteers, but few contribute very much to the user-oriented docs, and some of them work mainly on the FAQs and other wiki-based docs. The senior Co-lead, btw, is a Sun employee.
On the user guides side, which is where I spend most of my time, we had quite a few very active volunteers in the early days, but most of them have gone off to other projects, or jobs, or raising families. A steady stream of people sign up for the documentation project, but many contribute little or nothing. Those who do the best work tend to leave for a variety of reasons including serious health problems. The others have limited time; collectively it simply isn't enough. One of these days I'll calculate how many full-time-employee equivalents a project like this needs, just for the user guides.
Oh, and many of the active people also spend time on the user lists and forums, answering questions and gathering info on what needs to be covered (but isn't) or is hard to find, or whatever.
Aside: the user-services side of the OOo project has been undergoing a major transformation in the past year or so, with a new user forum, a more user-oriented website, development of the documentation wiki, and so on. Much remains to be done, but the improvement is HUGE, IMO. 

--Jean

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