[FM Discuss] FM futures

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

I will reply to a number of separate messages. My notes begin with '--'.

"mick fuzz" <mickfuzz at clearerchannel.org> wrote:
> Firstly, forgive me if I've forgotten this. Are you going to keep going
with
> Booki, and book sprints? And keep leading on the development on that
> project. If so how does this effect the FM project and the relationship -
> how linked will they continue to be because of that shared software?

"adam" <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
i will stay with fm, booki ad book sprints. i am not immediately
stepping away from fm and not sure i would ever step completely away but
i do want to decentralise fm. i am the central axis and i dont want to
be any longer because i think its not in the best interests of me or fm.

--We can split by language, country, or certain kinds of projects. I have
started a booki server for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs, and there
are others who might be interested in an alliance.

i think i would maintain some strong presence in fm for the next years
but i would like us to start a strong plan for making fm a community run
project instead of a single person running a community which is
sometimes how it seems to me

--Government by committee is remarkably ineffective. Having a committee
set policy and tell a manager to carry it out can work. In tech, the
benevolent dictator is commonly preferred, as long as it is possible to
fork out from under a dictator who goes off the rails. With GPLed books
and manuals, that is no problem.

> In fact - just to be devil's advocate. Say in a year FM decided that for us
> books weren't that important, it was the online free software manuals and
> the community that we wanted to concentrate on, and therefore if we decided
> to move to a new platform, or an existing one maintained by another
> foundation - say wikibooks for example. Is that something that you would
> want to avoid?

--I am not particular about where the work is done. I am with Harry Truman
on this: You can get a remarkable amount done if you don't mind who gets
the credit.

> And secondly, would you be up for sharing your own thoughts about what you
> think a transition would look like.
> Paid worker/s, possible sources of funding, tactics for maintaining
> momentum?

--I am looking into grant opportunities.

> I know that it's important that other people get involved and take
> ownership, but I think maybe that sharing would help it happen too.

i would rather discuss all this in a meeting. the bandwidth of email to
recount 4 years of decisions and complex relationships, strategies etc
is too much for email right now...

--I prefer to lay out possibilities ahead of time. I don't know whether I
can attend the meeting.

the meeting is the sharing moment for all this in my opinion.
=======
On 08/01/2011 12:55 PM, Daniel James wrote:
> Hi Adam,
>
> A major step towards that would be having a system administration team
> who have the necessary server access to fix everyday problems on FM.

We could work with the Sugar Labs admins on this. We have our own booki
server, maintained by dogi (Stefan Unterhauser).
=====
"Daniel James" <daniel.james at sourcefabric.org> wrote:
Who knows, maybe someone could write a book about how it works :-)

The Booki User Guide is great, but maybe we need some
install/maintain/extend information too. The Booki Developer Guide?

I suggest the Booki Admin Guide.

Cheers!

Daniel
=====
"adam" <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
i do think along with
a sys admin team we need a paper admin person. these are the two roles
(sys admin/paperwork) that need the most energy

--What kinds of paperwork?

adam
=====
"Daniel James" <daniel.james at sourcefabric.org> wrote:
I think that either you need a non-profit 'Booki Foundation' to do the
admin (which means fund-raising to get the thing off the ground), or you
need to partner up with an existing non-profit that will take on the
overhead, and leave you to do the fun stuff :-)

--Software Conservancy is willing to do some of that.

Cheers!

Daniel
=====
"adam" <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
fm is a non profit.

--A Dutch non-profit. Does FM have any money? We should have a US
non-profit partner, such as Software Conservancy.

adam
=====
"v0x" <vlax at dyne.org> wrote:
what about an admin team with representative people from any fm's language
sectors?

There are other ways to divide up our consituency, but certainly there
needs to be a language committtee, at least.
=====
"Tomi Toivio" <tomi at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
The Booki User Guide was the most read one on the Finnish FM last month.
Found the audience from a discussion group for open source content in
education. So it is quite likely somebody would like to install a Finnish
localization of Booki soon.

--We will have to discuss how to handle multiple translations from a
common source, without simply fragmenting by language. I would suggest
having a common server, with admins for each language section.

Regards
Tomi
=====
"Tomi Toivio" <tomi at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
And a chapter about selftranslate localization interface should be added
to the Booki manual... Since maybe that is something we should do with
Tuukka...

--Good idea. Adam thinks so too, in another e-mail.

-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks