It was then that the admonition to kill our darlings took a life of their own. When you’re close to something you’re writing, you need a fresh set of eyes to point out flaws that you have undoubtedly missed. This time, each team exchanged their work with another team. The content and structure became firmer and we began adding detail. While the pace of writing slowed a bit over the next two days, the focus was expanding on what we’d written on the first day and refining it. At that moment, I could feel everyone’s doubts evaporate. Until, that is, Adam Hyde popped in towards the end of the day and told the BRL-CAD team that we’d written close to 8,000 words-this was on par with the work the other teams had done. Still, the trepidation about reaching our goal lingered. It was refreshing to see that kind of collaboration and minimal ego-centric behavior. Every issue and debate was resolved quickly, efficiently, and bloodlessly. Questions about structure and style, conversations about approaches to take, and more. There was quite a bit of back and forth among members of all the groups. It wasn’t just three groups of people typing away in their own little bubbles. Still, they nudged those doubts aside, grabbed a chapter, and started writing furiously. A few participants doubted whether or not it was possible to write a book in the time we had. The idea was for us to focus on what needed to be in our books and not what we wanted or thought should be in the books.įrom there, writing began in earnest. The process of writingĭuring the process, Adam Hyde admonished us to kill your darlings, meaning don’t be afraid to cut sections or chapters. Using sticky notes, it’s easier to add, rearrange, edit, and excise sections of a book than it is with a digital tool. That was done in a very low-tech way: using sticky notes. Each group spent the first half of the day coming up with a table of contents for their books. Talk about moving outside of my comfort zone! Getting to Work This was an interesting choice because I had no knowledge of or interest in CAD. Myself and the other 'free agents' jumped on board with different projects. BRL-CAD went with writing a guide for potential contributors, Mallard decided to focus on a guide to its markup language, and OpenMRS opted for a developers guide. It helped everyone focus their ideas for the books.īy the end of the day, each project had decided on a topic for their books. This exercise was probably the most useful of them all. On the first day, Alan Gunn took the group through several exercises that had three main purposes: to get to know each other, to get us to ask questions about what would be going into our books, and to break us out of our comfort zones.įrom there, Gunn had us think about three audiences for the books and three outcomes that readers of the book would take away. The group was rounded out by four free agents (those who weren't, myself included, affiliated with any of the aforementioned projects). Most of the participants were from one of the following projects: Mallard (a markup language used to write online help), OpenMRS (an electronic medical record system platform), and BRL-CAD (a powerful design and modeling tool). The event drew 20 people from around the globe-from North America, Europe, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand-to Google’s campus in Mountain View, California. Part unconference, part book sprint, GSoC Doc Camp was organized by Google’s Open Source Programs Office and facilitated by Alan Gunn of Aspiration and Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals. Here’s a peek at what went down over those five days. I was fortunate enough to attend the event. A group of 20 open source enthusiasts gathered together in the middle of October and wrote not just one but three books in the span of five days. That’s what happened at the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Doc Camp. If you shut people in a room for a week with seven other people with the same interests, they have a ball and write a book.
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