Hi folks.

[ There's quite a wide distribution list on this message, and I'm not 
  subscribed to most of the lists I'm posting to, so I've set reply-to
  back to myself.  Due to the nature of the subject, some of you may well
  be on more than one of the lists I'm sending this to.  I apologise in
  advance for the inevitable duplication. ]

I'm writing in my capacity as the FreeBSD Documentation Project Manager.
As some of you are probably aware, there is a Usenix conference this June
in San Diego.  There are plenty of details on the Usenix web site, at

    <URL:http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix2000/>

I am hoping to organise (or, better yet, co-organise, if anyone else would
like to volunteer) a free software (or "Open Source" if you prefer) 
documentation Birds of a Feather (BoF) gathering one evening at the 
conference.

This BoF would be an excuse to meet up, talk through some of the issues
that affect all of us involved in free documentation projects, swap tips
and ideas, and probably imbibe a drink or two as well.

Some of the issues I think we could usefully collaborate on include the 
toolsets we use to write and format documentation, how to attract contributors
to our projects, how to make things easier for translation teams, standards
that we might be able to adopt to make it easier to migrate documentation
from one project to another, or from one development platform to another,
and so on.

That's to say nothing of discussions on how we can improve what we write, and
what's submitted to our projects, to make it easier for the end user to 
follow.

If you would be interested, please drop me a line to say so, so I can
liase with the Usenix organisers and provide them with a rough idea of 
numbers.

I've sent (or attempted to send) this message to the following people;

 * Gnome Doc. Project         * KDE Doc. Project      * Linux Doc. Project
 * Open Source Writers Group  * FreeBSD Doc. Project  * NetBSD General
 * OpenBSD General            * DocBook DTD list      * DocBook Apps list
 * SGML Tools list

However, I don't doubt there are a lot of other free software projects out
there with documentation teams.  Please feel free to forward this message
on to any other projects you know of, if you think they would also like to
participate.

N
-- 
Internet connection, $19.95 a month.  Computer, $799.95.  Modem, $149.95.
Telephone line, $24.95 a month.  Software, free.  USENET transmission,
hundreds if not thousands of dollars.  Thinking before posting, priceless.
Somethings in life you can't buy.  For everything else, there's MasterCard.
  -- Graham Reed, in the Scary Devil Monastery