[FM Discuss] the booki vision so far

[Janet Swisher]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 10:34 AM, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> hi,
>
> I am actively pursuing more leads for funding for the Booki development.
> Below is a text describing the vision. I want to trim this down to a
> short doc so I can easily ship it off to anyone interested. So, the
> below is source material, any comments welcomed.

> ** Re-imagining Publishing
> Creating reusable repositories of books and dispelling the myth of sole
> authorship is simultaneously a disruptive challenge to the publishing
> industry as well as a productive environment for collaboratively
> creating many wonderful new books. This is our goal for Booki.

As a follow-up to Jay's comment, I suggest recasting this whole paragraph:

Our goal for Booki is to establish a productive environment for
collaboratively creating many wonderful new books by seeding reusable
repositories of content. As side-effects to this goal, Booki
disruptively challenges the publishing industry and dispels the notion
of sole authorship as necessary for book production.

> The Booki interface is
> designed around the authors and their needs to write, to discuss their
> views, to seek assistance with partner writers, to translate and reuse
> content.

I'd like to change this to "designed around communities of authors ..."

> Booki uses open content licenses by default which
> partially assists reuse.

The significance of defaulting to open licensing is that it forces
users or at least administrators to make a conscious choice of a
license. In all other software, the default license is absolute
copyright. Imagine creating a new document in MS Word, and having it
ask "What license should this file have? () All rights reserved, ()
GPL, () CC-BY-SA, () Public domain". This is really a policy issue,
not a software issue; it should be possible to create closed content
with Booki, but one should have to consciously choose to do that.

--Janet