Documenters

The Documenters keep the knowledge findable. A Tinkerer’s pride is the working device on the bench. An Architect’s pride is the long view that bends to no fashion. A Documenter’s pride is the record that outlives both: the page a stranger lands on five years from now, when their own version of the same problem arrives.

This page is a living document. Its section headings follow the information architecture §5 list for /callings/[name].

What the calling is

A Documenter writes the repair guides, records the techniques, tends the wikis, shoots the video tutorials, updates the README, and posts the teardown. The work is unglamorous, and it compounds: every clean record makes the next fix faster for someone who was never in the room. The discipline is capture. What lives in one head dies with that head. What is written down outlives the writer, and outlives the device.

The Documenter accepts that some of their work will be wrong, will go stale, and will be corrected by strangers. They accept it because the alternative, leaving the knowledge unwritten, is worse than being wrong in public.

Lineage

The named ancestors of this calling: the iFixit contributors who built the largest open repair-manual archive in the world. The technical writers who made manufacturer documentation legible to people not on the company payroll. The archivists of dead platforms — the abandoned-OS librarians, the floppy-image curators, the people saving forum threads before the host shutters. The hackerspace wiki gardeners who keep the inventory page and the laser-cutter SOP and the membership rules current. And every patient soul who has ever explained their work in public.

The lineage is not a credential. It is an example.

How to develop in the calling

This is a curriculum, not a credential. Nothing on it is required. Each item is the kind of practice that, kept up over months and years, forms the eye and the hand of a Documenter.

• Write down the next thing you fix. Title, date, device, steps, what went wrong, what you would do differently. Photograph each step before you disturb it. Publish the result somewhere public, even if no one reads it. The practice is the curriculum.
• Adopt a wiki. Find a documentation surface that needs a gardener — an iFixit guide that is wrong, a hackerspace inventory page gone stale, a README untouched since the project began — and tend it for a season.
• Read the field’s standards. RFC 1925, The Pragmatic Programmer, the Diátaxis documentation framework, the iFixit Technical Writing Project style guide. Read them less for the rules than for the shape of the attention behind them.
• Practice the inverted pyramid. The reader who needs step three is rarely the reader who needs the introduction. Write so any single paragraph can stand on its own.
• Adopt one device, one technique, or one tradition and become its public record-keeper. For the first decade, depth beats breadth.

What contribution looks like

Concrete ways a Documenter serves the Open Circuit and the wider commons:

• Writing repair walkthroughs for /library/repair: original work, clearly attributed, with the practitioner’s name, the device, the date, and the outcome.
• Tending sections of /library/reading: annotating existing entries, proposing new ones with the reasoning spelled out, marking what has fallen out of print.
• Editing the canonical documents through public proposals. Documenters are the ones who catch the typo, the broken cross-reference, the section that has drifted out of step with its sibling.
• Translating canonical or living documents. Translation is documentation in another tongue.
• Contributing to iFixit, to Repair Café International’s event documentation, to the Internet Archive’s software collections, to hackerspace wikis, or to any of the long-running archival projects that hold the commons.

Practitioners who currently identify with this calling

[OPT-IN] — practitioners who name themselves Documenters may add themselves to this list by amendment, with whatever detail they choose to share. The list is opt-in, and no one is ever asked to join it.