Last week I attended a "needs discovery" meeting organised by Daniele Procida, who I've met several times at UK Python conferences. Daniele is now one of several Directors of Engineering at Canonical, the developers of Ubuntu Linux, where he has special responsibility for improving both documentation and the process by which it is created.
Daniele is also a current Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. The meeting last week was to discover needs for a workshop he's holding next month, to help Research Software Engineers improve their documentation. There were over 20 people there.
I hope that at tonight's TeX Hour we will share our experience of writing, rendering and using technical documentation, particularly for software. Daniele's approach is focussed on a quadrant of user needs.
The quadrant is
Top left: Tutorials (focussed on learning).
Top right: How-to guides (focussed on tasks).
Bottom left: Explanation (focussed on understanding).
Bottom right: Reference (focussed on information).
The up-down axis is practice and theory. The left-right axis is study and work.
Interested? Reflect on your own documentation experience, and visit:
Tonight's TeX hour is from 6:30 to 7:30pm UK (and UTC) time. The UK time now:
https://time.is/UK.
wishing you beautiful and effective documents
Jonathan