March 25 saw an interesting user-group meet, with a full-house in the small Goa Science Centre board-room.

Suhag Shirodkar, recently re-settled back from the US, explained all about technical writing and what it offered to youth wanting a career in it. She mentioned they had opened a 'brand new' India office at Caranzalem (Goa) and were looking for writers with the required skills.

Though this is not a GNU/Linux subject, it obviously would be of interest to many of our younger members. GNU/Linux also needs to build its own technical writing skills.

Suhag said they had three lines of work -- writing for the hardware and software industry, science writing (grant proposals, white papers, abstracts), and business writing (web content, white-papers, etc).

Edgar D'Souza, ILUG-Goa's long time member, shared his own experiences in technical writing.Suhag stressed that what was needed was good grammer, a knowledge of sentence structures, the use of thought and logic inone's work.

"Technical writing is not about giving an opinion, or having a slant and angle. It's about figuring out who is the user (of your writing) and what they need to know. It's not about us and what we want, but it's about what other people want," she added.

She stressed that the fundamental "building blocks" of good technical included good knowledge of the subject, some domain knowledge (either in coding, or having worked as a physicist, biotechnologist, chemist).

"There are many things thrown on our plate that we know nothing about. Our job is to grasp the fundamentals quickly, talk to the experts and get the knowledge," she added. "It's not rocket science."

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After a brief Q&A, Bijon Shaha took up the challenge of presenting ideas he had encountered minutes earlier. He shared with all a presentation titled Introduction to Open Source Library Management Systems. This talk is by Edward M. Corrado of Rider University Libraries and ecorrado@library.rider.edu You could probably find a copy on the internet, or ask me for one which ia 1.8MB file.

A very interesting subject. It covers software such as Koha, the made-in-Finland Emilda (www.emilda.org), PhPMyLibrary from the Philippines, phpmybibli (from FRance), OpenBiblio (which works on GNU/Linux as well as Windows), AvantiMicroLCS (an easy-to-install tool with a small footprint) and more.

The screenshots are very interesting and instructive.

After sharing time with the 15 people present, we broke and look forward to the meet on April 22, 2006. Do send in your suggestions on what you can talk about then... FN