I presented my first ever conference paper on utilizing Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) in concrete bridges. During the presentation, I explained my work using OpenSees and the very positive outcomes of the research. Fortunately, my Ph.D. advisor was also present in the audience. At the end of my presentation, he stood up, introduced himself and asked the audience members how many of them knew what BRBs were. To my surprise only a handful of listeners understood the concept of a BRB. I felt embarrassed since nowhere in my presentation I had shown or explained what a BRB was. A few of the listeners had background in Geotechnical engineering and some were students with no knowledge of how BRBs work. So even though I presented very positive outcomes of the research, only a few people could understand what I did or why it was important. I had lost the interest of my audience when I started to use the word "BRB".
The problem? I had assumed that my audience was already familiar with the concept of BRBs. I have observed a similar case with OpenSees documentation. A lot of experienced users have added some really good examples to OpenSeesPy documentation. However, I have been contacted by numerous new users that they have no idea what is going on in those examples. It is true! Look at the examples. It is assumed that the readers know everything about the commands that have been used. There are no annotated figures or images of what is being modeled in the examples. It really makes the learning more difficult. I am equally guilty since I have also submitted two examples to OpenSeesPy documentation. It is time the experienced OpenSees users also become responsible and fix the documentation so the budding users can feel more welcomed. Here is the GitHub repo of the OpenSeesPy documentation: https://github.com/zhuminjie/OpenSeesPyDoc |