Re: Cataloging LDP White Paper: Document Reorganization

[Kevin Cullis <kevincu@orci.com>]

Andy Oram wrote:
> 
> That's a well-thought-out summary; you've remembered a lot of things that
> technically sophisticated folks tend not to remember when they put together
> documentation. I responded particularly to the Basic/Backgrounder section.
> One note from my experience: I try to get the Key Concepts right (or as an
> editor, push authors to get it right) and find I rarely need a Key Terms
> section because people know the terms once they've finished Key Concepts.
> But it doesn't hurt to leave a placeholder for Key Terms because it may be
> useful in many documents.
> 
> While it may not affect this classification endeavor, we have to remember
> that documents tend to grow both in size and in scope. They also spawn
> related documents, which can be added to the
> Related sections.
> 
> Andy
> 
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Andy,

Thanks so much for the compliment (is it good enough for a book
proposal? ;-) ).  As one who has a Masters in Process Improvement, ALL
improvements are important, not matter HOW small.  As a suit moving into
the propeller head arena, I find that the communications from the techie
world to the user's world tends to be lacking (mostly programmers don't
think it's important).  Therefore, I'm taking up the cause!! ;-)

May I point out that "small ideas" should NOT be lost in the shadow of
every "Big Idea!"  Let me explain. I worked for Coors at one time (yea,
the beer company, it was a temp project during my Masters program) and
it came down from on high that only projects which saved $300,000 or
more were to be considered. They have 3000 people working for them.  Now
how long will it take to find that $300,000 savings?  How much time will
be in looking for only those sized projects?  Tons of hours and $$.  Now
look at this number: how about 3,000 employees finding savings of $100
each!!  Same dollar value, but EVERYONE is contributing!!  How many
people would be working on the single $300,000 project and who would
take ownership?  Fewer still.

Another example.  Again, during my Masters I watched a Admin person
retyping (on WordPerfect 5.2, the text based word processor) about 50
keys to bring up a word processor template.  I timed her typing and
WITHOUT mistakes, it took her about 30 seconds to bring up that
template.  To most, that doesn't seem like something to bother with. 
But when I asked her how many times she brought up that template, she
stated "about 30 times a day!"  To some, again, that still doesn't seem
like much, until you multiple the 30 seconds times the 30 times she does
that and she spent 15 minutes a typing the same thing over and over!!! 
When I finally showed her the macro capability, she was delighted that I
had saved her 15 minutes a day as well as her typing fingers. 
Everything counts in my book. ;-)

A key concept is communication while pppd or TCP/IP are key terms. 
However, TCP/IP is a key concept, but TCP and IP are key terms.  So,
depends on the scope.

Documents grow because things get more complicated and as more is added
to the body of knowledge, things get parsed smaller and smaller and
details grow.

A programmer friend of mine agrees with my CODETO concept and Pete and
I'll will be working over the next few weeks to modify my concept into
reality. He has stated that my idea, once it's adopted by Linux
programmers, will revolutionize Linux development and would take little
time to implement by module code maintainters (he was the one who got me
involved with Linux in the first place).

Continuous Improvement is the name of the game!!

Thanks again Andy.

Kevin
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