[FM Discuss] scribn the bazaar

[adam hyde]

hey Andy - nice post

On Sat, 2009-11-07 at 16:59 -0500, Andy Oram wrote:
> Letting people do what they want is great if you don't have a list of
> must-do topics. But what if there's some information that nobody
> happens to write about, and that you need in the book because it's the
> basis for understanding other things, or because readers want it and
> the organization sponsoring the project is committed to providing it?

on this point I agree - Fm does not work on a 'must-do' topic list, but
a 'will do' list. if someone writes to me, for example, and says 'x
manual must have a chapter on y' i write back and say 'great idea!
please register here [url], you will find the edit button on the top
right-hand corner'...

something similar works with book sprints - ie. the participants
describe the manual they 'will' write

the model you describe and the issue you face is exactly what doesn't
seem to work in FM and is, I would argue, one of the key points for
differentiating the Cathedral vs the Bazaar methodology. 

I guess then there are two choices - change the working methodology, or
find the authors you need.

> 
> Many of the books done by FLOSS Manuals are about easy-to-describe
> technologies. If the project leader notices that a key piece of
> information is missing, somebody can probably be found who knows the
> information and can take a couple hours to fill it in.
> 

im not sure i will go down the path with you and agree we focus only on
the easy to describe topics. i think for example, describing
circumvention is tricky when your target reader is a newbie. its not
necessarily a complex topic, but in that sprint (as we have done in
others) we spent a lot of time (more than 'a couple of hours') writing
and rewriting sections until we got it right.

> Furthermore, volunteers don't owe anything to anybody. Deadlines are
> also rare.

I think a deadline of 'a book in 2 days' or 'a book in 5 days' is a
pretty hard deadline and a pretty common one for FM

>  FLOSS Manuals is in an enviable position, because you can
> pretty much release whatever you have and say, "If you find that
> something is missing, go ahead and add it."

yep!

> 
> The situation is different with conventional publishers and advanced
> topics, which are the basis of most of the O'Reilly books I edit, for
> instance. I sometimes find it extremely hard--particularly because I
> have deadlines--to find someone to cover a topic that absolutely needs
> to be in the book.

i think the process is different. you describe the book then find the
authors. FM gathers the contributors and then describes the book.

> 
> But there's another model sort of halfway between the two Adam
> described. You find smart people you trust and just let them write
> about any topic they want.

i think this _is_ the FM model. except i would not say we 'find smart
people' in my experience everyone that has contributed to a Book Sprint
makes an extremely valuable addition - ie. i dont like the meritocratic
'smart' terminology which so often prevails in the geek world and which
you use here.

> 
> This is the familiar model for conference proceedings. They contain
> whatever the leaders of the field happen to be working on at the time.
> Some of the books produced that way at O'Reilly include Open Sources
> (which should interest people on this list) and Beautiful Code.


> Even in those anthologies, you want variety. Conferences achieve it by
> simply choosing the best representative of some line of thought and
> rejecting the other proposals. For Beautiful Code, we worked hard to
> get diversity in every way we could (national, gender, technology,
> programming language, etc.). We were mostly successful, but not
> entirely.

interesting... i prefer 'unconferences' - here you do not choose who
comes based on proposals (but there is a little vetting based on
personality), and you let them make up the schedule. this is closer to
how we run Book Sprints.


adam

 
> 
> Andy
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Adam Hyde
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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