Introduction

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.

Purpose

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.

Features

Projects and Issues

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.

Project Management

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.

Community Engagement and Client Outreach

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.

OSDDP Guide

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.

Licensing

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.

Webliography

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.

Why Use OSDDP?

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.