Documentation Strategy for a Small Software Project: Launching VoIP Drupal Introductions

VoIP Drupal is a window onto the promises and challenges faced by a new open source project, including its documentation. At O'Reilly, we've been conscious for some time that we lack a business model for documenting new collaborative projects--near the beginning, at the stage where they could use the most help with good materials to promote their work, but don't have a community large enough to support a book--and I joined VoIP Drupal to explore how a professional editor can help such a team.

Small projects can reach a certain maturity with poor and sparse document. But the critical move from early adopters to mainstream requires a lot more hand-holding for prospective users. And these projects can spare hardly any developer time for documentation. Users and fans can be helpful here, but their documentation needs to be checked and updated over time; furthermore, reliance on spontaneous contributions from users leads to spotty and unpredictable coverage.

Large projects can hire technical writers, but what they do is very different from traditional documentation; they must be community managers as well as writers and editors (see Anne Gentle's book Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation). So these projects can benefit from research into communities also...