[FM Discuss] update

[adam hyde]

heyho,

well, its been a while since i posted an update. There has been a heap
happening behind the scenes and I thought maybe its a good time to sum
it up.

First some dates...

June 25-29
Book Sprint - Open Translation Tools
We have a Book Sprint happening next week in Amsterdam. It will be about
Open Translation Tools. Its co-organised with Aspiration Tech, and held
June 25-29 at De Waag. The manual will be about translation, and its
application to text (on and offline), images (SVG), and video. There
will also be some material about localisation since we have pootle guru
Dwayne Bailey there.

August 10-16
Book Sprint - Ogg Theora
A manual about all things ogg theora - your favourite free video format.
Actually, we already have a lot about ogg theora already, so we will
round it off and publish it as a book. FFMPEG2Theora developer Jan
Gerber will be there and I am hoping Mako Hill might be able to make it
too. It will be in Berlin at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt.


Ok...also some other bits n bobs. The CiviCRM book has been developed
masterfully by Michael McAndrew and they have added several chapters
since the initial release some weeks ago. 

I will be attending FOO camp (an OReilly event in SF) and then Wikimania
(Argentina) - both in August - to represent FM. At Wikimania I also hope
to be on a panel about open publishing and also Michael Mandiberg,
Patrick Davison and I are trying to find the $ to get the Digital
Foundations book published on newsprint (1500 copies or so) to
distribute around the city and at wikimania.

Janet Swisher attended the Writing Open Source event in behalf of FM
last week, you probably saw the report Janet posted.

The Firefox manual also has some great momentum with David Tenser from
the Firefox doc team (SUMO) taking the lead. This is really super as its
cool that the Mozilla Foundation can see the use of the tool set and
their own team are now using it to make books...coolio..they will have a
one day remote sprint soon to update the manual for release with the
forthcoming Firefox 3.5

This month FM welcomed its 700th member to the english site...in january
I believe we had about 300...although the english site is still the main
site, I am hoping we might find the centre of gravity shifts within the
next year towards other languages...

On that note...there is a lot of momentum in the translation zone,
especially with the translation of several manuals to Greek quite
recently...actually, the translation zone is very busy with many people
starting their FM contributions there and then coming to understand
there is such a thing as an english FM also - this is really fantastic.
I think there are about 200 extra members on the translation site that
are not registered to any other FM language site

FLOSS Manuals Finnish localisation is underway...Tomi Toivio has been
employed by M-Cult in Helsinki to head up the FLOSS Manuals Finnish
community. He has translated several manuals and is now working on the
localisation.

The Command Line book we did with the Free Software Foundation will be
released by the FSF either this week or next week I believe...they will
sell it at $20 and give us the proceeds to organise another sprint. The
idea on the table at the moment from the FSF is to do the next one on
Mailman but I would also like to consider GPG/email security, or basic
system administration....any other ideas?

The Campware  (http://www.campware.org) people (Doug Arellanes and Sava
Tatic) from Prague stayed at my place last week and we discussed their
documentation needs. They will migrate their CampSite and CampCaster
docs to FM and then look to do a Book Sprint on CampCaster and
broadcasting.

Book Binding...Adam Thomas and Cara Bell Jones have been investigating
book binding possibilities for FM...I hope to have some updates on this
from them either this week or next week.

Linux Tag (Berlin) has invited FM to present our stuff at the end of
June in Berlin. If there is anyone that can be there for us that would
be cool as I will be in Amsterdam at the OTT sprint...

Objavi - Douglas has been developing a new version of Objavi (the pdf
generator that makes book formatted pdf) that handles Right to Left text
and has better css implementation. This means, for example, we could
publish books in Farsi which until now was not possible. This is really
something in itself. Also, the CSS support will allow for more complex
page construction, which might be interesting to enable some diversity
and flexibility in the layout of FM books...The new Objavi also runs as
a standalone service which means that we can use it with the forthcoming
Booki and potentially any other source content that uses the same basic
structure as FM content...interesting possibilities...Its in beta now
and looks good...more from Douglas on this soon...

Booki - Aco is with me now in Berlin on a holiday but he is taking time
to talk with me about booki and work on the new platform (booki). We
hope to have something to show by the end of the week... We will then
re-sync with Douglas on this at the end of the week or next week...more
from Aco soon on this too..

Artic Tech Book Sprint - there will be at some point a Book Sprint on
free software and its use in the artic...I am awaiting details and will
update when I know more...

Book Mobile - while in San Francisco I met with Brewster Kahle -
founder of Archive.org. It was quite a nice but wierd meeting at an old
bowling club (ten pin bowling) by the marina in San Francisco. Brewster
was quite blown away by what we do and offered his Book Mobile to us to
do as we please. The Book Mobile is a van with a full book binding
set-up in it. I thought we could go to communities and write manuals
and then make the books immediately after they are written...the
Mozilla Foundation (hi Chris if you are reading this) is wanting to do
some books about the internet so I will propose we perhaps collaborate
with them and go to communities, write the books, and make them on the
spot...but that is just one idea, other ideas welcome...

In case you missed it...FM was awarded an honorable mention at ARS
Electronica...

ok, i think thats it for now...please add/correct as necessary :)

adam



-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about