O’Reilly editor Andy Oram (who has long been responsible for our Linux publishing program), is also fascinated by the question of community documentation and support. He’s got a survey that he’d like you to participate in:
“Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a
software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put
up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software? If so,
please take the following survey to help O’Reilly do
research that will help us understand why people contribute to documentation (versus software projects themselves.) The results will be published on the O’Reilly web site,
and may help software projects and communities get more such
contributions.We’re only interested in hearing from people who do this for
non-monetary reasons.