[FM Discuss] scribn the bazaar

[adam hyde]

hi,

Recently I have been pondering the nature of Book Sprints and the FLOSS
Manuals community. It seems to me, in the somewhat simplistic
characterisation of Eric Raymond, that we are operating in the bazaar.
That is, we are a self-organising and rather ad-hoc community. It could
be described as organised from the bottom-up, unstructured, and open. 

However, we produce extremely good manuals, and we do it very fast.

The Cathedral model for production, is close to how a traditional
publisher might work. Indeed, it has often been cited by media
commentators that with the advent of the book, the 'book in stone' (the
Cathedral) was to be replaced by paper. It might have seemed at the time
that books would overthrow architecture. However, it actually seems more
accurate to say that paper has maintained the architecture quite well.
That is, top-down, highly structured, and closed.

I have some problems with the Cathedral as a publishing model, but it
has its place, and if it works, it works. However what I see as
problematic is the evolution of relatively recent writing projects that
are related to open source but do not seem to recognise their own
Cathedralness. This seems to me to be very interesting and problematic
because without recognising their own nature they fail on their own
terms. 

These projects want to catalyse networks, and return a product - often
'a book'. They are often characterised by the thorough research of the
proposed contents of the book, the attraction of collaborative partners
based on network status, and the assignment of chapters to authors. 

What I find interesting is that these projects, while seeing themselves
'part of the bazaar' and wanting to rapidly produce material, and foster
collaboration, seem instead to produce books very slowly and without
much collaborative contributions within the text. They seem, in other
words, to mirror quite closely the Cathedral model for production. 

thoughts...?

adam













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Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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