I've posted about this on my Bryght blog [1], but also wanted to mention it here.
The Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP for short) is doing some interesting work in combining open source methodologies and tools to connect students in Purdue's Professional Writing program with the open source community.
Of interest will be their introductory press release [2]:
In a new initiative to foster what Dr. David Blakesley calls "networked
learning," Purdue University students interact with new people and new
technologies to provide valuable open source
documentation. Students in a variety of English courses in the
Professional Writing major will study open source software, talk to its
designers and users, use the software themselves, then write and test
user documentation, help organizations promote their software in the
wider community, and even develop action plans for deploying such
software in new business and academic ventures.
And the introduction on the Drupal.org site [3]:
for the next 8 weeks, the students in my technical writing class will
be creating an end user documentation manual for Drupal 4.5. In the
spring, I hope to have students work on OpenOffice user documentation.
While there are only a few technical writing class offerings in the
program, we anticipate additional sections writing documentation for
other open source apps in the future.
What does this mean for REALNEO? Well, rather than having to write all sorts of end user help and how-to documentation ourselves, we can participate in this effort.
In fact, REALNEO might become a client of this program, engaging them to write a white paper or other custom collateral supporting this effort.
Links:
[1] http://www.bryght.com/node/view/112
[2] http://pw.english.purdue.edu/osddp/book/view/34
[3] http://drupal.org/node/11553