English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Like usual this was another easy week. I looked over some of the suggestions provided by the professor and I also looked over the corrections Zephyrus made to our white paper. The paper looked good with the corrections made and I was very happy with how it all turned out. Other than looking over the final paper there wasn't much else that I did this week. The only other thing that I did this week was get on to my account and make this post about what I did this week for the white paper project.

This week has been relatively easy going. With only two things to get accomplished this week, it was easier to get what was need to be done completed. The major task that I had to get finished was writing up my portion of the rough draft. I started writing up my portion of the rough draft on Wednesday and finished the typing Thursday afternoon. I typed up about five hundred words and came up with a good quote that could have been used as a persuasive tool in our white paper project. The only other thing that I had to do this week was write up this weeks group activity report.

The group was very productive this week. Everyone conducted much needed research which was very beneficial in making this project a success. Early this week there were emails passed among the group and we discussed the plan of action that we were going to take in order to get the rough draft completed. What we decided on was that everyone in the group was going to type up about a four-hundred word document and submit it to Zephyrus so he could put it into a template that would make up our rough draft.

This week was one of the busiest weeks so far for this project. The week started off with me making up a draft of the thumbnail to present to my fellow group members as a possible layout for out white paper. I didn't think that mine was the best draft but I think some good ideas came from what I had presented. My other group members did have some good ideas and over all great plans on what it should look like over all. Other than working on a thumbnail I did research. I found a great website that should be used for getting our information to put in our paper.

http://open-source.gbdirect.co.uk/migration/benefit.html

Thinking about all the uses of open source programming one thought crossed my mind, security. I stumbled across this site, http://www.albion.com/security/intro-7.html, which talks about how open source programming can be very beneficial, but not always secure. By having the source openly available for everyone to see it makes it easier for people to go in and make them more secure for their users. This website talks about why it is easier and how problems have been fixed in the past.

As I have been looking online for some good resources to use for this project I have had some trouble. While looking I came across the website http://www.abanet.org/intelprop/opensource.html. This website contains a lot of information pertaining to what open source is all about. It contains information regarding different types of open source programming, the history of open source, and the benefits of using open source. The most resourceful part of the site would be the information pertaining to the benefits of open source programming.

As I first started reading through this weeks reading selection I immediately noticed a few concepts that directly correlates to our current project in reference to ethics. The first form of ethics that I though directly influences this project is, personal ethics. The one reason why we are wanting to due this project is because of the censoring of information in respect to how programs are wrote. When big corporate companies, like Microsoft, will write their programs and won't let anyone see the code.

This week was another uneventful week in terms of getting things done for this project. I had spent a majority of this week in Daytona Beach partaking in the NCA Cheerleading National Competition. I briefly did some research on our topic while in Florida. There was some talk about narrowing down our audience for this project but I didn't participate in that very much. The group chose to target small not for profit organizations as our audience, but like I said I did not participate in these discussions.