Students and professors at Purdue University have implemented the Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP) to create, share, and revise open source documentation with others. OSDDP is a collaborative effort to achieve technical and business writing goals that can rarely be reached by a single student. Purdue students in a variety of English courses in the Professional Writing major will study open source software, write about it, talk to its designers and users, and use the software themselves. This experience will help the students write and test user documentation. Their new experiences will empower various organizations to promote their software to new markets and new communities. They will also develop action plans for deploying such software in new business and academic ventures.
Although the various professional writing programs at Purdue University have been client-oriented for some time now, the OSDDP project provides a foundation to build an expanded user base. Users will be able to interact using a standardized interface at a centralized online location where comments and revisions can be accessed. Anyone with an internet connection will now be able to access the resources of the OSDDP.
By expanding the client based curriculum, students will gain more of a real world feel of the business world. Clients will be able to post relevant issues on the OSDDP site concerning open source issues and students will be able to create content for those clients. This will aid the clients by freeing their time and saving them money, and it will aid the students by giving them experience with issues relevant to the world outside of academia.
By allowing students to collaborate in a centralized location, they are able to create recommendation reports, such as on converting static HTML websites to Drupal. Students can also implement open source software solutions in business, document for the open source applications, and provide white papers on specific open source solutions for clients.
The most versatile attribute of OSDDP is the Projects and Issues feature. New projects and papers are posted under this section of OSDDP on a regular basis, enabling the users in the community to easily post comments, opinions, critiques, and any other suggestions. These contributions are fundamental to any collaborative project and create a process of constant review and revision.
OSDDP fully utilizes its Projects and Issues feature by granting the ability to assign a particular project or issue to an individual or team. Once an issue/project has been assigned, the user can post updates and revisions to the issue/project, while at the same time allowing the public to post responses and suggestions.
By providing the user with the client list and the ongoing client progress reports, the community is able to keep a close tie in sharing its information. The members of the community or OSDDP include the participating professional writing instructors and students.
A large collection of community-built resources concerning the use of OSDDP will be maintained for reference purposes in the OSDDP Guide. Here, users seeking additional information will be able to find anything from user guides and site policies to white papers explaining open source issues. Best of all, all of this material, like the rest of the site, will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike2.0 License.
The open source principles of community involvement do not necessarily apply only to software development. In 2001, cyber law and intellectual property experts along with MIT professors founded an organization known as Creative Commons. This organization’s purpose is to apply open source principles to intellectual property outside of the computer science world. Artwork, music, writing, and open source documentation can all take advantage of community involvement.
OSDDP allows projects to cite sources in an online version of a bibliography, known here as a webliography. Because it is online, the webliography will be dynamic, allowing its users to update changes in real time. Perhaps the webliography's biggest advantage is its ability to simply link to cited online material. The ability to provide a centralized location to link all used resources will prove to be very beneficial.
In short, productivity. OSDDP uses Drupal, an open source content management system, to organize the projects site members submit. Using the selection of tools OSDDP provides, the direct OSDDP users and their clients have the ability to concurrently work on numbers of projects.
One individual may work on several simultaneous projects, and any particular project can have a number of contributors. Cooperation is made easy through the use of communication, allowing users from any location to contribute ideas and content alike. Organization within any particular project is also simplified through the use of controls. They allow the user to mark the document as active, needing review, completed, etc. Project leaders can be identified, and project status can be assigned and updated. Users can also search through the projects based on these states.
Overall, the effectiveness of OSDDP will grow as the number of users grows. Community networking will be the driving force behind the success of projects. Users are encouraged to contribute what they can to projects that interest them.
In this section, project planners will describe the goals of the OSDDP and its theoretical and philosophical rationale.
Q. What does OSDDP stand for?
A. OSDDP stands for Open Source Development and Documentation Project.
Q. What is the main purpose of OSDDP?
A. The main purpose of OSDDP is to provide a place where everyone can learn project development from each other through open source development as well as develop skills for producing professional and technical documents.
Q. What is a secondary purpose of OSDDP?
A. The secondary purpose of OSDDP is to provide open source documentation to the Purdue University Technical and Business Writing students as well as anyone who is interested in open source. This is an ongoing project that will allow Purdue students of future semesters to develop the work done by current students.
Q. Who is OSDDP for?
A. OSDDP is a community site designed for anyone interested in open source development and documentation organization as well as for the Purdue University students in Technical Writing (ENGL 421) and Business Writing (ENGL 420).
Q: Who is working on OSDDP?
A: Purdue University Technical Writing (English 421) and Business Writing (English 420) students, along with instructors, are working on OSDDP in order to learn more about Open Source documentation. Please visit the Purdue Professional Writing Program to find out more about 420 and 421.
Q. Who is heading the OSDDP project?
A. The co-directors of Purdue University's OSDDP project are Dr. David Blakesley and Charles Lowe.
Q: Who can join OSDDP?
A: Anyone is able to join OSDDP. All that is needed is an account. See “How do I create an account in OSDDP?” to create a user account.
Q. What is Drupal?
A: Drupal is an Open Source CMS reliant heavily on a large community of co-developers/users. It is the software running the OSDDP site. More information can be found at Drupal.
Q: Can I copy and use OSDDP documentation on my site?
A: Yes, if the terms of Creative Commons License, Attribuition-ShareAlike2.0 are followed.
Q: What is Search?
A: A tool on the OSDDP website that allows one to search through the site content. You would use this to find a particular comment, issue, project, or OSDDP user. However, Search does not handle punctuation very well. If there is punctuation included in the query then it will return a null every time.
Q: Where can I find a glossary of important terms for understanding the OSDDP and open source?
A: Please go to Glossary or click on the question mark (?) symbol that appears next to glossary terms wherever they appear.
Q. Which Content Management System is being used?
A. Drupal is the Content Management System (CMS) used on the OSDDP website.
Q: Where is the RSS feed for OSDDP?
A: On the bottom left hand corner of every page there is an icon labeled XML. This is the RSS feed for OSDDP. The RSS feed allows RSS-aware programs to stay up to date on the changes in the OSDDP weblogs.
Q: How do I create an account in OSDDP?
A: To create an account, scroll to the bottom of the left hand frame and click the link “create an account”. Follow the instructions, and check your email account for your temporary password.
Q. Can I use my login from an OSDDP partner site, such as Drupal?
A. Yes. As a convenience to the many shared members, users can use their Drupal distributed login from a partner site, such as Drupal, for the OSDDP site.
Q. How do I change my password?
A. After logging in to the OSDDP website with your username and password, on the toolbar on the left:
- Click 'my account.'
- Click 'edit account.'
In the Edit account form, fill in both password boxes with your desired password, then select 'Save user information' at the bottom of the screen.
Q. Is there a Drupal tutorial?
A. OSDDP members have created the Drupal End User Documentation: A guide for Drupal version 4.5.
Q. How do I post an issue, assign a task, post a comment, update an issue, attach a document to an issue, or post an issue for review?
A. Please go to Submitting Projects and Issues, which explains the process.Q: How do I know who is working on a task?
A: Within the description of each task, the creator of the task will have included a list of the people working on the task. The description is filled in during the submitting process. To find the one person responsible for the task, check the post by viewing it. The “Assigned” field is the name of the coordinator for the particular issue.
Q: What is the difference between commenting on an issue and updating an issue?
A: Commenting on an issue includes discussion and criticism. Any user can make comments. Users who are assigned to the task or are working on it should do the updating of an issue. Updating an issue allows more options, such as file attachment. Also see Submitting Projects and Issues.
Q: How do I submit to the front page?
A: First login using your user account. Once logged in click Create Content and then select story. Here you can type in a title and description to be added to the front page. Select submit when finished. Front page stories are bumped down as new stories are submitted.
Q: How can I see the latest content?
A: On the OSDDP home page under the ‘Navigation’ heading, click on ‘recent posts’ for a list of the most recently posted issues and comments. People can also “subscribe” to projects so that they receive new posts by email. Look under Projects > Issues > Subscribe.
West Lafayette, IN -- October 13th, 2004 -- The Professional Writing Program at Purdue University has implemented an evolution in service learning called the Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP). As members of a community formed to integrate learning with the open source development model, students, teachers, and clients are working together to develop documentation of and related to open source. Through their involvement in the project, students are gaining valuable experience in collaboration much needed for professional development while building business and technical communication skills
OSDDP is currently designated as a pilot program and is being used in almost a dozen business and technical writing courses offered through the English Department at the university. “[OSDDP] is initiating a new major course project involving service learning and community engagement, which Purdue is very interested in and that we see as critical to learning to write in the 21st century workplace,” explains Dr. David Blakesley, Director of Professional Writing at Purdue University.
The idea for OSDDP was derived from the concept of an open source development community, a widely practiced method of development and sharing that was previously relegated almost wholly to the software industry. Open source was made popular by such large scale projects as the Linux operating system. The success of such projects has been well documented and used as a stepping stone in developing new trends in open source.
The work of OSDDP generally takes on several different forms and acts as a way for individuals with no business or commercial interest in the work to provide insight, criticism and even contributions. “We think students will benefit greatly from this experience,” said Blakesley, “We don’t see this as traditional service learning, but as networked learning, because students are insinuating themselves into the ongoing conversations and processes that shape our culture…both service learning and networked learning are terrific ways to teach business, technical, and multimedia writing because students learn transferable rhetorical principles in interesting and complex situations. And they have fun doing it!”
Students enrolled in a professional writing course at Purdue that integrates OSDDP will have a chance to
If this program proves to be successful it could usher in a new era of collaborative education in American universities. With the recent success stories produced by open source efforts such as Linux, the idea is being widely accepted as a new standard for creative and rapid project development. The ability to get input on such a large scale, and to do so in a manner that allows individuals the ability to lend their own creative talents to the work, could make for a revolution in how we view writing development. One drawback to such a system tends to be the unorganized and somewhat chaotic manner in which responses are gathered and applied. This has been solved within Linux by implementing step-by-step development.
In the case of OSDDP, the community uses Drupal, an open source content management system, to manage documentation construction and workflow. Both student and teacher document teams develop their projects on the site via a public review process using Drupal's project management module. Completed documentation, whether published to the site or supplied to clients, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Thanks to this open source license, subsequent semesters of students and teachers can continue to build on previous projects, creating an opportunity for continual growth of OSDDP not possible in traditional professional writing projects for the classroom.
The OSDDP program at Purdue is the first of its kind and it could lead to a major breakthrough in the collaborative writing world if it is able to achieve the lofty goal that it has set for itself. The students and faculty remain optimistic that the program will be a roaring success at Purdue and will spread throughout the technical writing community, and quickly become the standard for writing collaboration.
For more information, visit the project website at
or contact one of the OSDDP directors:
Dr. David Blakesley
blakesle@purdue.edu
Charles Lowe
cel4145@cyberdash.com
David Blakesley -- 09/19/2003 - 11:09
In a new initiative to foster what Dr. David Blakesley calls "networked learning," Purdue University students interact with new people and new technologies to provide valuable open source documentation. Students in a variety of English courses in the Professional Writing major will study open source software, talk to its designers and users, use the software themselves, then write and test user documentation, help organizations promote their software in the wider community, and even develop action plans for deploying such software in new business and academic ventures.
"We think students will benefit greatly from this experience," said Blakesley, an associate professor of English and Director of Professional Writing. "We don't see this as traditional service learning, but as networked learning, because students are insinuating themselves into the ongoing conversations and processes that shape our culture, and becoming actors in this broader network by producing something this network culture values. Both service learning and networked learning are terrific ways to teach business, technical, and multimedia writing because students learn transferable rhetorical principles in interesting and complex situations. And they have fun doing it! Leading the charge in developing the open source documentation project at Purdue are Meredith Zoetewey, Assistant Director of Professional Writing, and Jennie Blankert, who mentors instructors and also teaches advanced courses in professional writing. Charles Lowe, a graduate student in English at Florida State University and continuing lecturer at Purdue, is a widely recognized leader of the open education movement (see http://open-education.org/ along with Dr. Samantha Blackmon, assistant professor of English at Purdue.
For more information, come back here and watch how the first group of students networks with people, learns about Drupal, and sets a new course for networked learning. It seems to be already happening.
--Updated 8/21/04--DB
Professional Writing Program Description