[FM Discuss] How will FLOSS Manuals expand? WAS: Are we ready to expand?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 9:22 AM, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> if FM is to consider making money to cover costs and grow, the thing I
> ponder about this is - which part of the organisation would make it?
> This isnt a question about WHO would make the money, but where in our
> current activities would it be best to make $

I'm for getting contracts from Free Software organizations, Ministries
of Education and other government agencies, NGOs, and international
development organizations, such as UNDP, WHO, or UNESCO.

> In my mind, selling books is something we would 'tack on the end' of
> what we do as its not really what we do now. What we do now is develop
> content, and so it would make the best sense to me that if we can
> generate income to make content we are actually fueling current
> processes rather than adopting new ones

+1

> for example, if we can get someone to pay us to write manuals then thats
> cool, cause we do it already, and we like doing it, and it means someone
> gets paid and more content goes into FM. great, exactly inline with our
> 'mission'

[snip]
> adam
>
> On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 08:05 -0700, chris hofmann wrote:
>> David has some good ideas here.   From my expericence at Mozilla its
>> important to broadly communicate the fact that you want or need more
>> money and to experiment with a variety of ways fo find some good ones
>> that match with the core values of the project.

+1

>> At Mozilla we tried a number of community organized campaigns that
>> helped with fund raising, and actively sought to organize part of our
>> community to focus just on these fund raising activities.
>>
>> We set up our own store ( http://store.mozilla.org/  ) to sell Mozilla
>> gear that help to raise money and promote the brand.  When the US store
>> proved too expensive for shipping and import fees to Europe we set up a
>> european affliate ( http://intlstore.mozilla.org/ ).

+1

>> The selling promotional goods though the store actually exceeded our
>> expectations for how much money it might generate, but we also had about
>> 6 years of building out the Mozilla community to hundreds of thousands
>> of participants and followers before we set up the store in 2004.
>>
>> Making the bookstore more prominent on  http://en.flossmanuals.net/ or
>> setting up and entirely new store site designed to feature, promote, and
>> streamline book sales, then trying affliate programs on the web sites of
>> all the open source projects now being supported to try and drive
>> traffic book sales seems like a natural step to explore.   Working hard
>> on the right economic terms to turn book sales into a better revenue
>> generator and revenue share between the project, the book producer, and
>> the shipping company might be tricky by it seems like it deserves some
>> work.  I recently bought the Inkscape manual from here in the US and I
>> could have very easily had most of my payment go to the shipping
>> company.  If people know that most of the money they are spending is
>> going for the good cause of producing the open source manuals they will
>> be much more likely to click on that [buy] button.
>>
>> Really working on trying to produce one high quality major hit or best
>> seller with one of the books manuals might also raise the general
>> visibility of project and all the things that its doing, and sales of
>> all the rest of the books being produced.  I don't know what that might
>> look like but it seems like something to explore.

I'm against the hunt for the best-seller. I prefer the idea of a
steady stream of contracts. Education using Sugar will require more
than 100 titles, for at least a dozen subjects for grades 1-12.

We also need to hit up every Linux distro with actual funding, at
least including Red Hat and Ubuntu, and each FLOSS project with actual
funding, such as Apache, Gnome, KDE, and each company making money
with a FLOSS strategy, including IBM, Google, and the rest.

Again I appeal for a Wiki where we can flesh out ideas like this.

-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)