[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Andy Oram]

This is a valuable discussion; it is not blue-sky but goes to the heart of our purpose and challenges how we are to achieve it.

And thanks so much for your praise of my article, Anne.

I've always approached books as something to be done beautifully, as Mick has been talking about--as something several notches above the noise on the forums, but I'm being dragged back to that noise repeatedly. I got so excited about our conversation that I wrote up some of my ideas as a blog:

  http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/challenges-from-a-book-sprint.html

I want FLOSS Manuals to have an extra splash of quality, but I don't believe we'll get there just by reader reviews. My own career is based on the proposition that my skills are worth paying for and can't be replaced by a thousand eyeballs looking randomly over material. But I want to make the most of what volunteer reviewers do.

Meanwhile, I like Anne's ideas for keeping in touch through IM and Twitter and so forth. One of the phenomena of new tech is that people ooh and ah over something that makes it a bit easier for them to do things they had trouble with--not realizing that something even better is just around the corner. We must keep trying new stuff. And then we'll have lots of FM members who can document new stuff when it's worthy. Lots of books about how to build a business using Twitter are coming out around now. Suppose we did a book to promote identi.ca? And then followed up with one about Crabgrass?

Andy