[FM Discuss] Are we ready to expand?

[Andy Oram]

The central question during the FLOSS Manuals meetings at Wintercamp
in March was how to put the organization on a firmer and broader
foundation so we could accommodate new projects. I'm facing that issue
increasingly. Here are two examples over the past two weeks:

1. For years I've been talking to a security and open source expert
   associated with OpenSIMS (http://opensims.sourceforge.net/) and
   when he recently brought up their documentation, I mentioned what
   FLOSS Manuals could do. He seemed interested and pulled in other
   project leaders, although the thread petered out for now.

2. On Friday I met the head of Cloudera (http://www.cloudera.com/) to
   see how I could form a relationship with O'Reilly. He complained
   about their documentation and said he'd be willing to pay someone
   to help, but didn't want a tech writer out of the blue with no
   commitment to the project. He challenged me to check their
   documentation and make a proposal. (Cloudera is a proprietary
   service but is closely based on open source software.)

As people on this FM list should know. I want to develop a new
business around consulting for projects like this. On the current
CiviCRM sprint, Adam is paying me to help--you all should be told. And
I'm earning it, too; I've already invested 12 hours in organizing and
evaluating input into the outline. I haven't even started editing yet,
and the sprint hasn't started.

So I think there are opportunities for both me personally and for
FLOSS Manuals here. Over the past few years I've encountered many open
source projects that knew they needed help with documentation and had
some funds they could invest in it.

Right now, FLOSS Manuals doesn't have a process that scales, but we
clearly have at least have a dozen people who can lead book sprints
and we have momentum. Furthermore, sprints don't have to be the only
way to produce documentation.

I'm going to start taking advantage of opportunities like OpenSIMS and
Cloudera. I don't know how it will relate to my job at O'Reilly, and
how it will relate to FLOSS Manuals. O'Reilly does some
community-building work but doesn't have any help in place for the
particular projects I'm interested in. The FM platform is attractive
and I value the expertise of my FM colleagues.

Following up on our Wintercamp discussions, what does FM need to have
in place so I can confidently encourage projects like OpenSIMS and
Cloudera to use it?

Andy