[FM Discuss] Quick impressions following CiviCRM book sprint

[adam hyde]

hey,

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 19:27 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> 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 dont think you caused the stress Andy. It was a result of us trying
something new. Thats ok by me, I hope for you also.

> 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?

Its a hard one to pick. So far no sprint has taken more than 3-4 hrs to
dev the Index in realspace. Thats not to say this will always be the
case. Some have benefited from prior discussions like the Sugar/OLPC
sprint.

> 
> The idea of discussing particular paragraphs sounds great to me, even
> though it smacks of undergrad George Eliot classes.

hehe!

>  It depends on the
> leader knowing what he or she wants to convey and using the paragraphs
> effectively as lessons.
> 

:)

adam

> Andy
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Adam Hyde
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