Documentation at the Summit

I’m hoping to lead two sessions about documentation at the Boston Summit this year.  Hopefully I can garner some interest from the blogosphere.

First, I want to give a short talk on topic-oriented documentation.  This is a very different way of thinking about your documentation, and I’d like to introduce people to it and convey some best practices.  The documentation team went topic-oriented with the new Mallard-based Empathy Help this release cycle.  But topic-oriented isn’t limited to Mallard, nor is it only relevant to user help.  I’ll try to keep the concepts general, while still giving guidance for the real-world systems we use.

After that, I’d like to have about three hours to lead a docfest.  I will help you write or improve any piece of documentation you bring to me.  If you don’t have something in mind already, I’ll find something for you.  It does not have to be user help, and it does not have to be topic-oriented.  I realize this is a hacker’s event, so bring me your API references or developer tutorials.  We’ll turn it from a random collection of thoughts into a coherent document people enjoy reading.

If you’re interested in either, please leave a comment.  Or send me an email at shaunm at gnome dot org.