October 14-18, Mountain View, CA – Mr. Eric Edwards, the Technical Publications Team Leader at SURVICE’s Aberdeen Area Operation, recently joined members of the BRL-CAD development team from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to participate in the 2013 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Doc Camp at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA. The main purpose of the unique camp, sponsored by Google and FLOSS Manuals, was to plan and conduct a “Doc Sprint,” which is a fast-paced approach to collaboratively planning, writing, and publishing a complete user’s manual in less than one week.
BRL-CAD was one of three open source software projects Google selected for this year’s camp. The 20 participant “sprinters” came from 8 different countries. Joining Eric on the seven-member BRL-CAD documentation team were individuals from the United States, India, Cameroon, and New Zealand. The manual the team produced, titled “Hacking BRL-CAD: A Contributor’s Guide,” is primarily targeted at attracting and assisting new BRL-CAD developers and documenters in the open source community.
The BRL-CAD modeling package is the oldest, continuously developed open source repository in existence, and it is the primary target description software used by the tri-Service community (including SURVICE).
For more information about the Google Doc Camp, visit http://www.booksprints.net/2013/10/2013-google-doc-camp-done/. In addition, you can view the online version of “Hacking BRL-CAD: A Contributor’s Guide” at http://en.flossmanuals.net/contributors-guide-to-brl-cad/.
