Day Two of FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint at Google Summer of Code Summit

We started the second day of the FLOSS Manuals sprint with a circle encounter where each person shared some impressions of the first day. Several reported that they had worked on wikis and other online documentation before, but discovered that doing a book was quite different (I could have told them that, of course). They knew that a book had to be more organized, and offer more background than typical online documentation. More fundamentally, they felt more responsibility toward a wider range of readers, knowing that the book would be held up as an authority on the software they worked on and cared so much about.

We noted how gratifying it was to get questions answered instantly and be able to go through several rounds of editing in just a couple minutes. I admitted that I had been infected with the enthusiasm of the KDE developers I was working with, but had to maintain a bit of critical distance, an ability to say, "Hey, you're telling me this piece of software is wonderful, but I find its use gnarly and convoluted."