Hi Daphne, I am a technical writer who just started working on the Apache Directory developer documentation, and that requires Java knowledge. It sounds like you are looking to work on end user documentation. I have 10+ years of experience in software documentation, so maybe I can give you some tips.
One caveat, I am relatively new to this project, and I defer to subsequent responses from experienced committers to the project. On to your question--I apologize if you know the following already, but it's worth making sure so here's some up front info just in case... Contributing to open source projects requires a lot of self-learning. These are technical projects where your help is welcomed, but you are expected to either have a lot of experience or are expected to be really good at figuring out a lot of things on your own. All open source projects provide the necessary info on how to contribute, including making doc contributions. In other words, the answer to your question is already there for you on the Apache Directory website already. Essentially, you can either fix existing doc bugs or propose doc enhancements, and the tools and info for doing so are described in detail such that in general you shouldn't need to be posting a question like this to the developer list. If they are not, then post and explain specifically what's lacking in that regard. That being said, of course, your post still has some value in that it may garner some interest, make others aware of your skills, and open the door to some doc need info that has been percolating in some developer's head. But generally, you should be able to move forward on your own and find things to work on without even asking. Also, unless you are already familiar with tools like JIRA, Maven, Markdown, Subversion, etc., there can be a lot to learn just to be able to understand the workflow and tools to be able to submit a documentation fix or improvement, let alone learn the underlying software so you can revise a user guide's contents. But if you are up for the challenge, it is an awesome learning experience...just don't expect much hand-holding and only ask questions to developers as a last resort after googling, checking JIRA issues, etc. With all that said, I am new to this project and have noticed that the published guides are very good and thorough, but have some minor issues. For example, if you install the software and use the guides to learn the software, you will notice some minor doc issues. So you may want to start doing essentially usability testing of the existing docs and noting things to fix. You also may find existing doc issues documented in the bug tracking tool -- JIRA. Before getting to involved in digging in to the usability testing, you may want to find a JIRA issue (marked "documentation") and then see if you can figure out all the mechanics of submitting a documentation patch, and submit one successfully. Going through that effort alone will be a great learning process. Hope that helps, Martin Rosse On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 9:18 AM, Daphne Somkin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi - I am a Tech Writer looking to get some documentation experience. Can > you direct me to the part of your project that needs documentation help? > > I don't know any programming languages. > > Thank you, > Respectfully yours, > > Daphne Somkin > www.writingwizard.org ~ 415.819.0600 > > > >
