[FM Discuss] Are we ready to expand?

[Andy Oram]

Aw, Anne, I'm hoping to build the Renault of technical documentation, and you talk of a "cottage industry..."

I don't have a comprehensive reply (and that's why I opened up discussion on this group) but I'll add a few points.

1. Adam, thanks for showing confidence that FM can handle projects like the ones I mentioned. I noticed that a lot of the site setup for CiviCRM had to be done by you, and I know that you're teaching other people to do some of it, but I get the impression that we're not ready to have 5 or 10 people setting up new pages on a whim each time we contact an interested project. But I'll just keep you in the loop.

2. David Farning was making some detailed notes at Wintercamp, I remember, about what FM needs to scale and be sure of its future. David, that's relevant to this discussion if my memory is right.

3. A company like Cloudera probably has their own facilities that they'd like to use for documentation, but some documentation efforts will probably strain those facilities. That's why I wrote articles about the need for new tools, and FM provides some that make writing easy. But FM is oriented book-length projects and to making it easy to combine chapters into new books. Some of the projects I might recommend to Cloudera or OpenSIMS might be more blog-like.

4. Anne: I think any project to which we invite volunteers has to put the documentation under an open license. Nobody would have an incentive to volunteer her time otherwise. I think Cloudera understands that and would go along. Companies are recognizing the real value of open source, which I think I've caught in the last section of my article http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/free-software-meets-corporate.html (scroll down to "The most important benefit of free software: developing new programmers")

5. I'm going to work on CiviCRM and a couple more projects (OpenSIMS and Cloudera, if they sign up) and figure out how much time I'll take and how much I need to charge to make it more than a sideline. But I don't know how much strain I'm putting on the FM infrastructure or on Adam, and how much FM should ask in addition to what I want to charge. 

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: Anne Gentle <annegentle at justwriteclick.com>
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Sent: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:42:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Are we ready to expand?

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.

...