[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Andy Oram]

I've been silent for a couple days, but now I have an evening to answer FM-related mail and start working on the command-line manual again.

John's idea below sounds like a really nice project, although a big one. To give businesses enough information about all the tools for them to feel confident they can trust their businesses to free software, you'd have to say a lot about each tool.

This reminds me that a few years ago I tried to pull together a book about the value of open source software and open formats (two different but related issues) for government. At first I thought I would propose it at O'Reilly, but we decided we couldn't sell enough copies to make money, so I tried to organize it as a collaborative project covering multiple continents (sound familiar?). That didn't work.

It was an advocacy book, not a how-to book, but the goal was similar: to persuade frightened office managers to make the migration.

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: "John & Melonie Curwood" <marketing at lovinglearning.co.nz>
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 9:36:18 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

With regards to an OpenOffice manual, maybe create a doing stuff with 
free software manual about running a small business or something which 
would include Openoffice, something like mozilla thunderbird/sunbird or 
evolution for email/organising and something like gnucash or better (I'm 
not familiar with OpenSource Accounting packages) for doing the accounts.

I know it is not as exciting as say the digital foundations book, but it 
could have quite a wide audience.

As some one said earler it would take more that a sprint to put and 
Openoffice manual together, more like a marathon, or in this case maybe 
a triathlon. :)

Cheers,

John