Just to note:

> I also believe Csound culture suffers sometimes because it seems everything
> is catered to those who already know what they're doing. I've read numerous
> Csound related documents that assumes way to much from the intended
> audience, including some truly esoteric technical guru type stuff. Much of
> the documentation that exists is written from the perspective of an
> engineer, rather than a designer or composer.

We have to keep in mind that Csound came out in 86 at a time when
everyone using it was using it on Unix and everyone using it was
familiar with commandline's as that was the most common interface out.
 It's assumptions were appropriate 22 years ago. Things have changed
over time obviously, though to be honest, most of the people who are
most likely to be contributing documentation now are developers who
are creating an opcode, and all of the developers I know here are very
comfortable with command-line's. We're also very short on time, and
mostly Csound is not a major part of our day job's.  Jim mentioned not
wanting to give up a year of his time for free documentation, but I
could easily say without a doubt that most developers who are working
on Csound have spent much longer than that to build and debug the
software.

Of course, we would all like the Csound userbase/community to grow.
We would also like Csound to work well for everyone and that we all
focus our time music-making versus just setting up things.  To do so
we need documentation now that is more geared to new users with the
assumption they might not know much about how computers work.  I don't
think however that the developers should be the ones driving this kind
of documentation; I'd rather they be focused on programming and
debugging things.  They should probably explain and add documentation
for technical developments they have added, but the things like basics
of computing I would hope could be contributed by others.

John Lato just wrote some fine information in another email that would
be great to have in a manual; perhaps more small contributions like
that would be the way to grow the documentation.  This is a community
project after all, and no need for a single individual to take on the
entire task.  I think if we could collaborate to create a general
outline of what needs to be covered, we could then volunteer to cover
different sections.  Could set up a wiki or shared google doc to do
this.  Anyways, just a thought.

steven