[FM Discuss] Are we ready to expand?

[Anne Gentle]

Andy -
I think these are great questions and you are fielding questions for the
types of recruit projects we'd want FM to be part of. I agree though that
scalability is the main issue - I have many more writing projects I'd like
to be part of. So it's scalability of muliple types of people that we'd need
to address. :)

One observation I've had is that people are interested in FM and Book
Sprints especially, but unless their project brings an enthusiastic
maintainer along with them, the content might not be maintained as well as
it would be if they kept even one or two writers as maintainers after the
excitement of the sprint dies down a little.

Let's also talk numbers if we may. I once wrote up a realistic budget with
the finances we used for the OLPC/SugarLabs book sprint. It was easily over
$5000 for travel, lodging, and food for 8-10 participants. Plus the
facilitation fee at a minimum should be $1000-2000, and the editor role may
be a similar fee. But, I'd argue, if you think about hiring a contract
writer for a specific deliverable, there's no way you'd get the quality of
doc we got out of our sprint, plus we got more writers involved in the FM
community, which was, as they say, priceless. I guess what I'm trying to say
is that the price tag on a Book Sprint is super cheap compared to contract
tech writing.

I think there is a cottage industry in here somewhere, and I'd love to be a
part of it. What I think I see so far is that enterprise manual writers
would want the FM platform (or a wiki expert to tell them what platform
would work well and someone to customize it all) and a facilitator, or
training to become the facilitator for the sprint. I also presented a
presentation about wikis to a group of about 50 tech writers last week, and
they wanted to know how to collaborate with other writers without having a
sprint to do so.

So Andy your angle is much more in the open source space, and I'm quite
interested in the application of the lessons learned from FM and wikis in
the enterprise. Do these two angles intersect? Definitely. Have I answered.
your original question yet? Hm. Probably not. :) But I will say, if Open
SIMS introduces a real writer to us, we can certainly help them get started.
The rest of the "go-get-'em" attitude has to come from writers on those
projects, I would think.

Wow, I wish I could get to Writing Open Source to talk to more writers about
their recruiting successes and failures. Adam's done an incredible job of
assembling the group we have now - how do we keep adding awesome people to
our group?

Anne

P.S. I've talked to whurley about the OpenSIMS project and I once recruited
a writer for them, but I don't know whether the writer got into the project
or not. Interesting. I wonder if joining a community like FM would help
OpenSIMS with their writer recruitment?

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Anne Gentle
email: annegentle at justwriteclick.com
blog: www.justwriteclick.com
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