[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Andy Oram]

Adam mentioned that the FSF book sprint this past weekend had more people working simultaneously on a book than ever before at FLOSS Manuals. We divided the book into smaller and smaller files to enable simultaneous editing. The FLOSS Manuals server held up admirably (yay, tech team) and the IRC channel helped a lot to recruit volunteers, coordinate contributions, and bolster morale (yay again, tech team).

But this experience is just the nose of the camel. We're going to become more popular and we're going to get more contributions in small chunks. I'm still a little nervous about the job I'm assigning myself of going over the whole manual and making the flow just as good as any work by a single expert author.

As I reported in previous mail, O'Reilly folks are interested in FLOSS Manuals. But all the buzz around here (you can get a sense of it by visiting radar.oreilly.com) is about really tiny exchanges of information: what happens with Twitter and other even newer initiatives. The new generation is on mobile devices and wants interaction as much as information. They're quite happy with information in chunks smaller than this email message.

I think that, despite the name "FLOSS Manuals," we have to think about smaller contributions and about how to tie them together. I've known this at least since 2004 when I first wrote about online contributions. Here's one of my articles for background:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/07/06/rethinking-community-documentation.html

Linking disparate contributions, ratings, and other ways of marshalling the flood will become more important.

Andy