Another incredible day has wrapped up with the Writing Open Source crew. We're not just conference participants anymore, we're a crew. (We know we're a crew because the Web site no longer has a conference schedule, but a forum for discussion after the conference has ended.) It's been incredible to watch the progression as people look both outward for support and best practices, and inward to apply new information to existing practices within a team project.

Today we had several sessions that came from yesterday's talks they included:

• Dru on the BSD certification project
• Janet on the FLOSS Manuals project
• Shaun on the new markup language he's created for GNOME docs: project mallard
• an adhoc discussion on the challenges of translation and the toolkit that we're currently struggling with in various projects

After stuffing ourselves with ideas, we headed up to Inglis Falls at the request of the mayor. (She felt it was inappropriate for people to come all this way and not see the falls. She was right.) After dinner talk was filled the commerce of open source, authoring books for main stream publishers and more. A whole lot of really funny jokes have been established. You know the kind that make no sense without context and are only referred to by their punchline? Y'know, like this:

[ ] F

I can assure you that is all kinds of hilarious. It was so hilarious that Milo translated it:

[ ] V

Awwww, yeah: there's nothing like a good documentation joke. Apologies to those of you who were following along in Identi.ca and Twitter tonight. The dip into senseless tweeting and denting was inevitable after two days of really awesome, and thought provoking, content.

Sunday (tomorrow) is a project sprint day so I expect the tweet feeds to be fairly quiet. In the mean time, check out some of the links above for projects that might not have otherwise been on your radar. There's some truly fantastic work happening in the world of open source documentation and I'm very excited to be a part of it.

A number of years ago I saw James Gilmore give a presentation about the experience economy. It gave me the term for what my parents had taught me growing up: provide an amazing experience for a person and you will inspire them to learn new things, and engage with others. Today the stage was set for the world's first ever (as far as we know) conference for open source documentation. It's only been a day but already people are sharing exciting new ideas and talking about collaboration. Although this is natural for a conference to get that excitement, what's amazing is that the sharing is happening across projects where you never would have guessed it would feel natural.

The conference Writing Open Source was conceived months ago: the idea was simple and crazy. I care about documentation, and so do a few of my friends, so I bet there are more. Why not meet and share some good food and good conversation and see what we can learn from each other. In my experience, creative people get even more creative when you give them crazy-awesome things to talk about. We kicked off the first day of the conference with an amazing breakfast (with real maple syrup), a visit from the mayor, and bag pipes. Except it wasn't just the mayor and bag pipes. It was a procession through downtown Owen Sound, led by the piper and the mayor (and her grand daughter) as we moved from our breakfast venue to our conference venue.

During the day we had five exceptional presenters deliver engaging, funny, thought provoking and truly outstanding talks. They were recorded and hopefully will be uploaded to archive.org (or somewhere) in the near future.

It's not just about the speakers though: all participants have engaged and are participating in creating and shaping the experience as it unfolds. Whether they are new to documentation, or are seasoned experts, participants are contributing their passion for open source, documentation and community (yes, and even their passion for licensing). What an incredible experience it's already been. And it's only the end of day 1.

I'm sure there will be more blog posts as Dru has told us all to write daily, but in the mean time...try a search through identi.ca or twitter for the conference hashtag: #woscon09. Not surprisingly, a conference on documentation is getting a LOT of real-time reporting.

Tonight I spent about two hours cleaning up the multi-site install instructions on drupal.org. Mostly I was trying to roll in some comments and generally tidy what had already been written. I noticed that the documentation for multi-site is sorely lacking though. There are a lot of really great tutorials that exist somewhere other than d.o (I'm looking at you Kevin, and you Jam!), but the information hasn't been rolled into our Official Documentation. Multi-site is just one example where Drupal.org documentation is less gooder [sic] than what the rest of the internet has to offer. There are other topics that are also lacking quality documentation. You probably know what they are.

I know that Addison has amazing monthly challenges for the doc team, but here's mine: for every minute you've spent complaining about the docs in the last month, spend two minutes fixing the pages you think are confusing, lacking information or outright wrong. Did you write a tutorial in the last month on your own site because you couldn't find the information on drupal.org? Now's the time to make the d.o docs better--find the place where that information should be and add it. (Of course you should only add information that you have written.) Anyone with a drupal.org account is already a member of the documentation team and can add and modify documentation on Drupal.org. (Cool, eh?!)

If you have an awesome tutorial but you're not sure where it fits: ask! We're in IRC (#drupal-docs on freenode) and we have a mailing list. We can help you find the best spot to put the information. And if you can't find the best spot. At least find a spot. We have a list of recently updated pages and can shuffle new pages that seem out of place. The goal here isn't to have 9832878 variations of the same information in drupal.org, so look carefully and make sure you are adding new information before creating a new page. Chances are good the information is "sort of" there but needs a little bit of care to include the bits that are missing. This might mean you need to edit a couple of different pages to place all of your information into the site.

I know that it can sometimes be a little bit intimidating to edit The Official Documentation, but that's why we track revisions for the pages: so that you can make changes without worrying about losing information! If you've ever felt you needed an invitation or permission to edit the docs, please consider this a personal request from me to you. I need your help, the team needs your help and Drupal needs your help.