[FM Discuss] 2 more testimonials

[adam hyde]

hi,

Sometime ago I asked the list for some testimonials and some nice ones
have come in...here are two more _very_ nice testimonials. The first
from Chris Hofman (Moz) and the second from Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman
Center/Global Voices)...good testament to the good work we all do :)

-----------------


"I first worked with FLOSS Manuals in early 2009 as a participant in one
of their Book Sprints. It was a great experience and we produced a great
Firefox manual - in 3 short days. 

I have continued to follow the progress of FLOSS Manuals closely, often
participating in community discussions and supporting the project
whenever I can. I am happy to see they continue to make excellent
progress and are applying lessons learned from the first generation of
FLOSS Manuals's tools. 

The new system called "Booki" embodies the skills, tools, and
experiences that the FLOSS Manuals community has gained over the last
couple of years to create a new kind of publishing. Booki changes all by
enabling the production of books on dramatically faster cycles and
reducing the obstacles that get in the way of community and open
publishing. "


Chris Hofmann, Director Engineering
Mozilla


----


"The rise of open source software has been widely acknowledged as one
of the most exciting developments of the 21st century. The ability of
geographically distributed individuals to produce mission-critical
software and systems offers not only a challenge to the software
industry as we commonly understand it, but intriguing hints about the
future of economics in a connected age.

Often missed in the enthusiasm about open source software is an
understanding of the model's limitations. Developers have an
increasingly impressive track record in bringing innovative new
software to light and to rapidly addressing the bugs discovered in
this software. Their track record of documenting this software and in
producing usable manuals, on the other hand, is pretty dreadful.
Writing a new email package is viewed as sexy and exciting - writing
the manual to allow someone to use that package is usually viewed as a
necessary evil at best, as a task for an unspecified someone else, at
worst.

Enter FLOSS Manuals. Adam Hyde and friends are applying some of the
best thinking of the open source movement to solve one of that
movement's important and nagging problems: documentation. Without
documentation, FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) software
is less useful, less usable, and less able to displace expensive and
often inferior (though better documented) closed source software.
FLOSS Manuals close the gap between the developers and users of
software, exploring the power and potential of these tools from the
perspective of experienced users, rather than from the inside
perspective of the developer. As such, they're some of the most
compelling and useful manuals on tools like Firefox, CiviCRM,
OpenOffice, Wordpress and GNU/Linux.

These are critical tools for users around the world, but they're
especially important for users in the developing world, as they
represent low/no-cost alternatives to very expensive proprietary
software. It's no surprise that the One Laptop Per Child project is
working closely with FLOSS Manuals to document their software, used by
children across the globe.

FLOSS Manuals' process is as fascinating and compelling as the work
they produce. Books are jointly authored by anywhere from a handful to
dozens of authors, collaborating using wikis and other shared
workspaces. Many books are produced using a "book sprint", a unique
form of book writing that involves inviting a small group of experts
on a tool or process to live and work together for a few days and
produce the essential skeleton - and often the entire text - of a
manual. Sprints are frequently organized around conferences and
meetings of tool developers, leveraging the systems used to organize
FLOSS software development to allow for documentation of code. The
model has been surprisingly successful in turning out high quality
text on very short deadlines. I witnessed a sprint conducted in
conjunction with a summit on Open Translation Tools - within a few
days, half a dozen lead authors created the best text available on the
subject. (My modest contribution, an essay I'd written previously, was
sliced and diced into am introduction for the volume, which detracts
only slightly from the quality of the project as a whole.)

Translatability is a key feature of books produced by the FLOSS
process. They're licensed in such a way that potential translators
face a minimum of hoops to jump through in translating the texts,
which makes them easier to localize for developing world environments,
or to make available in accessible editions for the blind and
disabled.

As the open source ecosystem matures, we are beginning to understand
what aspects of this new model work well and which are spaces for
further learning and innovation. Two years ago, I would have decried
the poor quality of documentation available for users of open source
software and pointed to it as a key reason why FLOSS software faces
barriers to adoption. Now I can point to FLOSS Manuals as a model for
how this work should be carried out, and as an organization capable of
carrying out this work on a wider basis, with appropriate support. I
celebrate the work Adam and friends have done so far and endorse, in
the strongest terms possible, their models and working method. I hope
they'll see increasing recognition and support, as there's a mountain
of projects out there that deserve and demand the sort of high quality
documentation FLOSS Manuals has begun to provide."

-Ethan Zuckerman
senior researcher, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard
University
co-founder, Global Voices Online


-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals &
Booki Project Manager 

Contact Information
German mobile : + 49 177 4935122
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc : irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals


"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about

Free Software for making Free Books
http://www.booki.cc/