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Welcome
Welcome to Schoolyard Greyfiti, an open source, online journal for sharing useful techniques among professionals in the technical communications field in a manner that supports the individual copyright and licensing terms of each contributor to this site. Although this site runs on a wiki engine, it is not a traditional wiki site because most of the pages on this site are restricted from being edited by anyone except their original author. Instead, this site contains formal published articles and guides that:
- Can be revised and updated only by the work's author, in an evergreen manner
- Are the sole copyright of the work's author
- Have licensing terms specified by the work's author
To find works on this site
Searching for keywords or using the tag cloud might drop you into any interior page within a larger work, and you can always follow the breadcrumb trail back to the start page for the work (these are prefixed with Article: and Guide:). But if you prefer to filter out the interior pages and browse only through the start pages for each work on this site, try any of the following techniques:
- Use the by author menu.
- Use the by subject menu.
- Use the by title menu.
- Include the keywords "article:" and "guide:" in your search queries (include the colon in the keyword).
- Use the sitemap menu to browse the entire sitemap.
To publish your works on this site
Follow the how to author link in the sidebar.
Why this site?
For better or worse, the overwhelming success of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001 has conclusively demonstrated that the era of revenue-driven, walled-garden, "professional" gatekeepers of information is finished. In the domain of technical communication, there is no longer any real need for professionals to go through lengthy submission, approval, and editorial processes to be published in the STC or ACM journals. The real shame is that both of these traditional venues completely hide your hard work from everyone except subscribing members of their organization. If you are not a paying member in good standing, you cannot even see an excerpted portion of the work to help you decide whether it's worth paying the hefty price for a per-article purchase or becoming a subscribing member. This archaic practice of creating such barriers to entry for our profession is anathema in the current social and economic climate, especially given the brain drain that our profession has seen in the past decade, which will only increase as those of us with long experience edge closer to retirement age with proportionally few newcomers to take our place. Another problem with the traditional journals is that their articles are static. How many times have you stated opinions and observations, or conveyed a methodology for achieving some goal, only to change your mind about many of the particulars a few years down the road? You cannot revise a static article that you published years or months ago as you learn new things, or when the world in which that article was germane has evolved and changed in ways that make the article stale and outdated.
Some of us have grasped this sea change in recent years and have made attempts to openly share knowledge with our peers by creating professional blogs and even entire community sites. But blogs and community sites are a poor fit for pure information sharing. The blog format is too distributed, and blog posts are a poor fit for many types of information that we have to share with each other, especially procedural, conceptual, and reference information. Web CMS environments such as Drupal or Joomla are too admin-intensive for simple public collaboration and publishing, and they can lead to bloated community sites that try to do too many things to be useful for pure information sharing. A wiki site is the best fit for an open source journal concept, provided it has features that enable protected content authoring and the site operator employs some creative site copyright and licensing policies. To my knowledge, this site is the first such attempt at providing a focused information sharing resource for technical communications professionals that is fully open, dynamic, and evergreen while also promoting individual contributors and protecting their content and their intellectual property rights. I hope that you will find it a useful resource, and that you'll be motivated to share your own experience here.