User:Anna.sobiepanek/FSOSS 09

Introduction

October 24, 2009 - October 30, 2009 was Toronto Open Source Week, a celebration of Open Source Technology. As part of the celebration, Seneca College hosted the annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium. FSOSS allows members of the Open Source community to come together and share their ideas. More importantly, it allows newcomers to get involved.

Check out the workshops.

Check out the list of presentations.

Fame, Fortune, and Technical Writing by:Dru Lavigne

Dru Lavigne talked about making technical writing a career. She pointed out that this is a great time to become a technical writer, as there is 0 barriers to entry. Nowadays you can publish yourself on the web easily, and most often for free. After all, there is always room for more documentation. Dru stated that if you are good, you will get noticed, and you will get paid. But in order to get notices, you have to write and do so daily. When people search for you using a search engine, they should be able to find good examples of your work as well as your followers. Also, you should get involved and collaborate with the community. This includes editors, proof readers, and editors.

Dru Lavigne broke down her talk into Recognition, Inspiration, Publishing, and Earning Money. Here is what she had to say:

Recognition In order to get recognized you have to get your work and name out there through; blogs, book reviews, articles, and How To's. Don't wait until your work is perfect before publishing it on the web, if you do the topic might not be interesting or popular anymore. If you want to be a perfectionist, focus your efforts on making sure your grammar and spelling is flawless, even in your personal blog's. Most importantly, do your research. The information you post must be credible.

Inspiration Write about whatever interests you. There are many things that Open Source projects need like; documentation team members and leaders, man pages, tutorial, and guides for newcomers. You can also write articles and news in mainstream publications, write papers, brochures, and critique artwork or web content. Sometimes you have to change-it-up to get creativity flowing.

Publishing

So you want to get published? Publishers want to see that you have a big following, an audience. They also want to know that your expertise is currently 'hot' or popular. Most importantly, they want a well thought out proposal. Write your proposal as if you were gonna start writing your book tomorrow.

Some interesting stuff:

• for technical books 10,000 copies sold makes it a "best seller"
• taking 3 months(50 hrs/week) to write a book is considered fast
• a very small # of books get promoted by mainstream publishers and small publishers have less resources for promotion