[FM Discuss] Manual-a-thon fundraiser

[adam hyde]

hey all,

Just a bit of background - Mel is from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC-
http://laptop.org/). This is the organisation that is distributing the
$100 laptops. We have been discussing developing user documentation for
the laptop. Its interesting for a variety of reasons, the first being
that the laptop uses Squeak...if you aren't familiar with it you can see
the Squeakland game here - http://squeakland.org/

Squeak is a contender to challenge flash but its actually a lot more
powerful. It is (as I understand it) developed by some of the
developers, including Alan Kay, who also worked on the early versions of
smalltalk
(http://smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_Abstract.html).

Documenting Squeakland is interesting because of its icon based language
and Mel and I discussed documenting Squeakland using only icons and
images.

This might lead into another possibility - to document the actual
interface of the OLPC OS as it is fedora based and there is an icon-only
version ('Sugar') to facilitate the use of the laptop by the iliterate
or for use across languages/character sets
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Icons). 

I think this would be extremely interesting.

We haven't discussed how yet, we had a good meeting at Wikimania and
some good email exchanges - the possibilities are quite exciting I
think.

adam




On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 10:56 -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> Greetings! Adam asked me to post this to the list.
> 
> We're planning on doing some FLOSSmanuals projects for the Summer of 
> Content program (summerofcontent.org - those of you at Wikimania might 
> remember myself and/or SJ talking about it) and are looking for ways to 
> raise funds to sponsor interns. One idea we came up with was a 
> manual-a-thon. Clipping from email follows:
> 
> <snip>
> If we get a good project proposal out, we might be able to convince some 
> other companies & organizations to pitch in - or we could do a FM 
> fundraiser specifically for this project - maybe a manual-a-thon? Get 
> people, companies, organizations to donate $1, $5, $10, $100 (whatever) 
> for every chapter completed (start to finish) in a FLOSSmanual within a 
>   48-hour time period, all proceeds go to fund the XO manual project.
> 
> Double bonus since we raise funds for the stipend (I'm pretty sure we 
> can score at least $1000 US, probably several times that) and get 
> publicity & content for FM.
> </snip>
> 
> Thoughts? Anyone interested in organizing a manual-a-thon in the next 
> few months? Discuss on-list.
> 
> -Mel
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
-- 


adam hyde
floss manuals

free manuals for free software
http://www.flossmanuals.net

mobile : + 31 6 154 22770 (Netherlands mobile)
email : adam at flossmanuals.net