[FM Discuss] groups that are companies, one manual groups etc

[adam]

hey

On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 22:46 +1100, Anna Helme wrote:
> hi adam,
> 
> my first thoughts are that groups would be handy for contributors to the 
> plumi project to be able to contribute documentation to the plumi 
> manual, but it would be good to limit who is able to publish changes 
> that are added by other people outside of this group to maintain a level 
> of quality control. it would be great if anyone could contribute 
> changes, but those who are members of the group have the power to 
> publish/approve those changes.
> 

so, good points...the publish possibilities are much more flexible than
with the previous system. In essence there are two possibilities to
publish:
1. export a file (pdf, epub, etc)
2. export the manual as HTML with templates

anyone can use these two features. It is mostly controlled from the
export tab of the manual. So that means if Plumi, for example, wants to
publish a book on lulu - the tools are there - go for yer life! 

It also means that you can *pull* content to your own server as HTML
wrapped up in your own template. I will send details of this later...but
its simple...you need a little script that will 'wget' the manual in the
template you design. the /read part of the site will do exactly this as
it happens.

So you can publish the content in these two ways...you can also ask the
FM admins to pull the content to FM and list the manual on the /read
section.

So the question of 'how to filter who publishes' the content is kinda an
oddly interesting question in this context - and maybe not the question
you intended it to be...within this context its possibly more
interesting than any of us know since it is quite fresh ground to be
exploring 

> but i probably don't understand group functionality in Booki to speak to 
> other uses of groups... i had a quick look at the Booki user guide, but 
> i didn't find a clear overview of what membership of a group gives to me 
> as a member. what do you mean by communication channels? what 
> rights/permissions does a group member have over books belonging to that 
> group, that an ordinary user does not have?
> 

membership of a group at the moment gives you nothing extra except by
joining one you make me a little happier :) the *intent* of groups
however is that it gives you the possibility to create
synergies...before booki we had relatively isolated silos of content and
the only cross-collaboration (across different manuals) was from people
that either met accidentally in the FM chat or met via the FM mailing
list. There have been good collaborations that have built up this way.
The Thunderbird manual and sprint is a good recent example of this where
Mark started a manual and Scott brought his energy to it and boosted it
along with a sprint to which Jennifer from Mozilla also joined in...,I
thought that was pretty cool and made me realise we need more of this...

However...these synergies need more 'activation possibilities'....we
need to get people crossing the paths of others more often...and that is
where we want to take groups...

how we do it is still in the process of being decided. Partly by this
discussion, partly by the stubborness of Aco and I ;) and also partly by
a forthcoming process whereby the OSI has given some money to booki
development to work these issues out (we will also be working with
Aspiration on this)....so...there is nothing concrete with groups
yet...so my questions are probably too early, but i wanted to see what
the feeling was within FM as to what groups *could* be and understand if
the idea of cross-manual collaborations were of interest or whether
people wanted their own silos of content ...or a mix of the two...or...

so...i am sorry i cant be more concrete...i hope we can still continue
this conversation even though it is pretty speculative...

adam

> apols, i just joined the discussion list so no doubt have missed many 
> conversations on this and other topics.
> 
> cheers,
> anna
> 
> On 14/12/10 8:01 PM, adam hyde wrote:
> > hi all,
> >
> > so...some questions as to what we do with groups...
> >
> > i'd be interested in a conversation about what groups should be.
> > Yesterday I wrote a little about where we want to go with them but now I
> > would like to open up a conversation about how to manage these.
> >
> > I have two points with some questions...so, first...what are peoples
> > views on Groups which are dedicated to a specific software (vs a
> > topic/category of software)...I would be interested to know especially
> > from Zotronic and Plumi what their feeling is about this. I want to see
> > cross-software collaboration occur and my feeling was that groups would
> > turn into hubs for this. If you write on one software in the CMS group
> > you might know something about another software in the same group and
> > get in the flow of their communication channels and start contributing
> > (for example)... Of course we dont yet have the tools to make this
> > happen but they are coming (but perhaps this makes this conversation a
> > little pre-mature). in anycase... what do you guys see as the advantage
> > of having a group dedicated to just one software? interested in your
> > thoughts...
> >
> > second. what do we do with companies? Do we encourage these entities to
> > put their softwares into topic categories...or are company names ok for
> > group names? Personally I am unclear on this. I kind of have no problem
> > with it until I feel like it is stepping over the line toward
> > advertising. Granted thats a hard thing to do in this environment but
> > anyways...opening this up to conversation...
> >
> >
> > adam
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
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