[FM Discuss] and the year begins

[Julian Oliver]

kia ora and happy new year FM,

..on or around Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 06:57:30PM +0100, adam hyde said:
> 
> I hope everyone had a cheery new years and christmas!
> 
> Thought I should do a quick update before we kick off a new year. There
> has been a lot happening but it may have seemed quiet due to low list
> traffic in the last 6-8 weeks. I encourage anyone doing FM related work
> to put as much correspondence thru the list! :) 
> 
> Heres some FM highlights from the last 8 weeks or so:
> 1. Aco has been busy on plugin development which is pretty wonderful. I
> believe Aco will send information about the dev but essentially we have
> some localisation and translation plugins. These worked out to offer
> some great functionality we hadn't banked on and offer some very
> interesting possibilities but I will leave Aco to elaborate. You can
> sneak a peak at one of the plugins thru the docs I wrote for it in the
> FM manual (http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals) under
> 'localisation'.
> 
> 2. Anne Gentle from OLPC has started working on the OLPC Simple guide
> using FM. Its looking pretty good and I hope this development will
> continue. We have discussed some other migration possibilities of OLPC
> manuals -> FM, but one step at a time!
> 

looking forward to this.. a great partnership i think.

> 3. PureData Booksprint - Derek Holzer, Luka Princic and I will meet in
> Croatia this march if all goes well and trial a book sprint. This is an
> intensive working week where we live, cook, 'n work together for an
> intensive period focusing on one particular manual. I am hoping we will
> get not just a PureData manual, but a working methodology for book
> sprints which we could try and apply to other material.
> 
> 4. Zita Joyce has been searching for Farsi translators and found some in
> NZ. We are awaiting the go ahead for the Farsi site, so hopefully more
> on this soon.

great, that'll open up the audience considerably.

> 
> 5. Simon Yuill and I are working on a Scribus manual. 

there's a manual i need ;)

> 
> 6. Luka Frelih has done some wonderful scripting for FM. Luka and I
> spent some time together in Ljubljana a few weeks ago and he offered to
> help get the DTP processes stream-lined using Scribus. The
> print-on-demand process has previously been reliant on
> a ..err...non-free app (blush) and I had been feeling pretty lousy about
> it. So now Luka has developed a wonderful import script using the
> internal python scripting engine in Scribus. You can see the first
> experiment with this here:
> http://en.flossmanuals.net/publish/PDF/Blender_Scribus_draft1_2.pdf
> 

good work Luka!

worth mentioning the PDF rendering under Linux with Evince looks a
little crunchy. the titles are smooth though:

  http://julianoliver.com/tmp/blender-FM-shot.png

i'll try a few other PDF readers and report back. Evince is usually fine.

> The above is a link to the Blender manual prepared using the python
> import script for print-on-demand. If you look at it in a PDF viewer it
> will seem like there a lot of 'empty' pages, but remember - the layout
> is for print. Never-the-less I think it makes a good PDF.
> 
> I am very interested in feedback about the layout and look and feel
> (designed by Lotte). I'm also interested in the way the credits are
> dealt with in the front of the pdf/book (Julian - any comments?)
> 

it's a tricky one. saying it was /collaboratively/ produced isn't quite
true. i wrote that manual, with the exception of the pages on how to
install Blender. you, FM, invited me to do precisely this.

formatting was improved, typos fixed and some clarifications made later, 
which i suppose you could describe as a 'collaboration' of sorts.

if it's better - for whatever reason - for you to call it a
collaboration then so be it. in truth though it does feel a little weird 
at this end.

you could just say 'First Draft: <author name>' and then list all the
other people that contributed to it, perhaps even with their
contributions listed in a similarly general fashion. maybe that'd be
clearer and feel a little more motivating for others to write manuals
for FM in future.

what are some other folks thoughts on this? 

Derek: if i was to correct something in the PD manual would you be cool
with us both being 'collaborators' on the PD manual you'd largely
written?

attribution is a difficult problem, in some senses has broader social
implications. why quantitatively assess contributions? isn't every
contribution to be valued and encouraged as such? 

while being ideal, i believe this normalisation doesn't work; it's
important not to underestimate how much the belief a person will be
recognised for their contribution motivates them to contribute in the
first instance.

> 7. After chasing a board member down I finally have his bio and
> re-confirmation of involvement. Phew. So I am kick starting the board
> intros this week (long overdue).
> 
> 8. Mick Fuzz wrote a marathon amount of material for video distribution.
> In particular we have a very nice Azureus (bittorrent client) manual and
> an excellent Avidemux (transcoder, editor, subtitle manager) manual
> (also on print on demand - http://www.lulu.com/content/1815079), and
> after a bit of editing we will have an excellent manual on archive.org,
> miro, and podcasting.
> 

yikes.

> 9. Mick is also organising an event to coincide with the Video Vortex
> (http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/) event in Amsterdam. Micks
> event is called vxmission (http://transmission.cc/vxmission) and will be
> held partly in the FM studios and in a squat nearby. FM will present FM
> and Mick will present some of the manuals he has written.
> 
> 10. There is some discussion of other manuals for the book sprint model,
> but too early to mention really. When they get closer to being confirmed
> I will write more about them.
> 
> 
> Those are the highlights, there is more but I'll post more as things
> become more confirmed. So you thought all was quiet! Indeed not. 
> 
> Anyways, I'm in Amsterdam at the moment, and off to NZ for a few weeks
> after a TWiki meeting in Amsterdam on the 25th of this month. There is a
> floss camp in NZ there which happens to be next to my favourite camping
> ground. Goodo! 
> 

argh, i'm jealous!

julian

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