Last week, I ran a one-day FLOSS Manuals book sprint to update the Thunderbird manual that I helped write last year. The usual book sprint lasts anywhere from two to five days — so why did was this one only a single day?
A few reasons. While there were a number of changes to Thunderbird since the team originally wrote the manual, not all of those changes were major. Plus, at the moment, I’m extremely busy. There’s a lot going on in my personal and professional lives right now, aside from the 1,001 things that make them both a joy and a purgatory. One day was all I could spare.
The one-day sprint was interesting. And fun. Here’s a quick look at what went down.
With apologies to 
I was at a friend’s house the other day and pointed to something stuck to his refrigerator. It was an invitation to a mutual friend’s birthday party from months ago. The card had a photo of the birthday man sitting in a deck chair sipping a martini. The deck had been made cozy by potted grasses and palms that seemed to surround him. The image was printed in sepia tone.
I view documentation as serving three main purposes:
There’s definitely a lot of talk about the mobile universe in our profession. More and more technical communicators are coming to realize that the devices that we carry in our hands and in our bags are becoming a platform on which to deliver information and documentation.
Back in the mid to late 1990s, I didn’t have much money to buy new hardware. Actually, my computing was done on older desktops and laptops. Of course, that hardware wouldn’t run the latest versions of Windows (at least not too well) and I hadn’t started my journey to Linux just yet.