Technical writers as a good model of everyday user
Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 13, 2006 09:22 PM
It would seem that technical writers behave very much as everyday users: for them computing is strictly a means to an end, and fail to see the more profound implications of how you do your computing on society.
Many developers are not far from that situation either. They will do the lowest amount of effort of self-education to be able to perform what is requested in their job.
For these kind of people hoping to recruit them as FOSS users based on philosophy is pointless. They will only use FOSS tools if it is very obvious that they will receive an immediate benefit (see firefox), or if they are trained to use such apps.
So the only way to succeed among such a user base is:
- learn and emulate firefox - target schools, universities, and decision makers on the benefits of FOSS.
The rest of the people are sheep. They will not take the initiative of self-training to FOSS, but they will also just learn it if forced by their employers/teachers, whatever.
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Technical writers as a good model of everyday user
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 13, 2006 09:22 PMMany developers are not far from that situation either. They will do the lowest amount of effort of self-education to be able to perform what is requested in their job.
For these kind of people hoping to recruit them as FOSS users based on philosophy is pointless. They will only use FOSS tools if it is very obvious that they will receive an immediate benefit (see firefox), or if they are trained to use such apps.
So the only way to succeed among such a user base is:
- learn and emulate firefox
- target schools, universities, and decision makers on the benefits of FOSS.
The rest of the people are sheep. They will not take the initiative of self-training to FOSS, but they will also just learn it if forced by their employers/teachers, whatever.
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