[FM Discuss] Quick impressions following CiviCRM book sprint

[Andy Oram]

A few even quicker impressions.

First, Adam, I'm sorry I increased the stress level at the sprint, and
that you had to deal with it as the on-site leader. I certainly pulled
back as soon as someone complained.

I thought I claimed the mantel of an aggressive editor, not a
provocative one--but that adjective serves just as well. I'll be doing
it next week as you suggest, when the CiviCRM team is ready for more
comments. (They always agreed with you that the comments were good,
but just not always well-timed.)

I agree with Adam and David that a complex narrative can't be achieved
on a sprint, and is hard to do on a team even if there's a lot of
time. The kind of in-and-out, case-study-marbled book conceived by the
CiviCRM folks is like a Mahler symphony, and a sprint is a jazz combo.
But someday we try doing fancy book structures over longer periods of
time.

Regarding the outline: I think it's fine to call it brainstorming
instead. The outline worked particularly well on the Command-Line FSF
sprint. I wrote it in about an hour (other people then suggested
changes), and the final book came out looking a lot like it. But this
was because the command-line is such a familiar subject. It has been
covered before in a dozen books. Our treatment had some creative
aspects (I take some credit for them), but it wasn't an exploration of
totally virgin ground like the CiviCRM project.

You have to hand it to the CiviCRM volunteers to conceive of such an
audacious and subtle project.

We should look for some middle ground, though, between handing
sprinters a canned outline and waiting for them to assemble before
doing an outline (Index). I'm worried that next time it will take much
more than 3 hours. What if you have one or two sprinters who don't fit
into the consensus, perhaps because they're inexperienced in the
topic, inexperienced in reasonable expectations for a book, or just
ornery?

The idea of discussing particular paragraphs sounds great to me, even
though it smacks of undergrad George Eliot classes. It depends on the
leader knowing what he or she wants to convey and using the paragraphs
effectively as lessons.

Andy