I'd like to announce a new Drupal community and documentation project, Purdue University's Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP). Sponsored by the Professional Writing Program at Purdue, OSDDP is a community of almost 200 instructors and students from business and professional writing classes working together on a variety of projects:

• Documentation for open source software -- for the next 8 weeks, the students in my technical writing class will be creating an end user documentation manual for Drupal 4.5. In the spring, I hope to have students work on OpenOffice user documentation. While there are only a few technical writing class offerings in the program, we anticipate additional sections writing documentation for other open source apps in the future.
• White papers on open source and open content -- students across many sections of writing classes have been writing white papers--some of which will soon be published to the site--on subjects such as
  • OpenOffice
  • The History of Mozilla
  • Open Standards vs Closed Standards
  • Open Source in Education
  • Wikipedia
• Documentation for the OSDDP site

As OSDDP is based on the open source development model, all projects are publicly reviewed and managed using Drupal's project module. And all documentation published to the site in the OSSDDP Guide or provided to clients is done so under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike2.0.

This is a novel method for conducting professional writing projects, and we anticipate the project may grow in scope over the coming year. For instance, we want student groups to do more work with clients in relation to open source projects or even clients merely working with open source software (for example, Drupal sites). Therefore, Drupal developers and website users are invited to submit requests for documentation work. Realize that the bulk of the writers are business students, so imagine that they would be best at creating texts such as marketing materials or recommendation reports on why using Drupal might be suitable for a particular business model.

Feel free to come by and register. Learn more about the project by consulting our most recent press release or by reading the overview page. And if you are interested in serving as a client, post to the front page describing your work or site and the kinds of documents you would be interested in having produced. If you have a suggestion for a white paper that might serve the open source community, feel free to post a new issue to our project module.