[FM Discuss] Manual-a-thon fundraiser

[Mel Chua]

A bit more background: Summer of Content is a program that OLPC, Google, 
Fedora, and the Commonwealth of Learning are starting to promote open 
content development. Think Google's Summer of Code program but for 
content, with a larger amount of smaller stipends to target interns and 
projects from the developing world.

summerofcontent.org - although the best current short explanation is 
probably this:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Summer_of_Content#A_better_explanation.3F

Part of the idea is to get Summer of Content interns to do FLOSSmanuals 
development, including OLPC/Sugar FLOSSmanuals.

-Mel

adam hyde wrote:
> 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
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