gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

If the future of Redbooks is remote residencies and wikis anyone can edit, then I’ll think twice to contribute to the wikis and I’m almost certainly not contributing to future Redbooks. I don’t like the travel that much, but this is just an unproductive change similar to the move to ILO courses.

I don’t have too much against using wikis, but it needs changes to the process. Review of non-SME changes – IBMer or not. If someone is authorized on a book as an SME he should be able to make annotations and edits. Annotations should be reviewed by the other authors and not seen by people who’re not SMEs and there should be only one truth. The same version that’s available on w3 should be available to our customers. And if I’m the last person to prefer FrameMaker over using a browser to edit a Redbook, then so be it.

The problems that you have with ILO like not being in the same timezone and only connecting through phones to people you’ve never actually met are just that more serious if you have to produce high-quality output for weeks when working on a Redbook – not to mention the fact that you need to focus on the task at hand and not do it part-time.

I hope someone thinks about this, at least for WebSphere Redbooks. I won’t be at Lotusphere, so I can’t provide feedback there. I would’ve liked to see a session like this at WSTC, but we know how that went. Let’s hope we can do this later in the year, but I’m not holding my breath.