Developing a user information architecture for Rational's ClearCase product family documentation set
SIGDOC '99 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computer documentation
A framework analysis of the open source software development paradigm
ICIS '00 Proceedings of the twenty first international conference on Information systems
Open (source)ing the doors for contributor-run digital libraries
Communications of the ACM
1st workshop on open source software engineering
ICSE '01 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering
DITA XML: a reuse by reference architecture for technical documentation
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
A unified process for software and documentation development
IPCC/SIGDOC '00 Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology & teamwork
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Linux, Open Source, and Software's Future
IEEE Software
Is the Open-Source Community Setting a Bad Example?
IEEE Software
Culture Clash and the Road to World Domination
IEEE Software
IEEE Software
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Educational models and open source: resisting the proprietary university
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Documentation, participatory citizenship, and the web: the potential of open systems
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Scenario-based and model-driven information development with XML DITA
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation
Designing electronic reference documentation for software component libraries
Journal of Systems and Software
Expect the unexpected: error code mismatches between documentation and the real world
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering
Open Source Software Development Process Model: A Grounded Theory Approach
Journal of Global Information Management
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Iterative development models allow developers to respond quickly to changing user requirements, but place increasing demands on writers who must handle increasing amounts of change with ever-decreasing resources. In the software development world, one solution to this problem is open-source development: allowing the users to set requirements and priorities by actually contributing to the development of the software. This results in just-in-time software improvements that are explicitly user-driven, since they are actually developed by users.In this article we will discuss how the open source model can be extended to the development of documentation. In many open-source projects, the role of writer has remained unchanged: documentation development remains a specialized activity, owned by a single writer or group of writers, who work as best they can with key developers and frequently out-of-date specification documents. However, a potentially more rewarding approach is to open the development of the documentation to the same sort of community involvement that gives rise to the software: using forums and mailing lists as the tools for developing documentation, driven by debate and dialogue among the actual users and developers.Just as open-source development blurs the line between user and developer, open-source documentation will blur the line between reader and writer. Someone who is a novice reader in one area may be an expert author in another. Two key activities emerge for the technical writer in such a model: as gatekeeper and moderator for FAQs and formal documentation, and as literate expert user of the system they are documenting.