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OSDDP: Involving Students With Open Source Docs

Posted by timothy on from the hey-look-they're-adding-to-the-commonwealth dept.

cel4145 writes "The Professional Writing Program at Purdue University recently began the Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP) where students and instructors across multiple sections of business and technical writing are producing documentation for and about open source applications (see the press release or a mirror). The community and project are modeled after the open source development model and based on service learning principles. For example, students are already working on end user documentation and case study analysis for Drupal and market research and analysis for OpenOffice. Completed texts will be published using a Creative Commons license."

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. License by Pan+T.+Hose · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does anyone know why the Creative Commons license was used instead if the GNU Free Documentation License? Are those licenses compatible? For example, would it be possible to made that work available on Wikibooks and parts of that documentation incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles? I hope so, becuase it is going to be a magnificent project and Wikipedia is a central respository of free knowledge today.

    --
    Sincerely,
    Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
    "Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
  2. Pros and Cons by fembots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can see a couple of advantages such as independant, objective and professional documentation for Open Source.

    On the other hand, I'm also concerned that these documentations might not be as in-depth as if they were written by the persons involved in these projects.

    I mean, will we see a similar case like "The marketing department never understands what we IT is really doing!"?

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
  3. Re:License-Gatekeepers! Set my information free. by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 4, Insightful


    For all forms of knowledge there are gatekeepers. Even your beloved Internet has a gatekeeper know as an ISP.

    My ISP is being a poor gatekeeper then. I can change service to another ISP. I can go to my local internet cafe. I can go the the library. I can wait until I go to work. In all cases, I can access the same information without my ISP either being aware of or having any say in that access.


    Yes, lets hold up as a good example of what we'll get, The Internet. OK so you've just read something on the web. So how do you know it is correct?

    Something gets printed in a Journal. How do you know it is correct? The same process of peer review and established trust can be done with the web. And, in fact, has been done for quite some time.