[FM Discuss] FM futures

[Tomi Toivio]

> --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 that the smaller languages would have a lot of trouble getting
started at all without having a lot of manuals available for translation.
For an example only five million people read and write Finnish, which means
the amount of potential contributors isn't huge. And there are even smaller
languages in the world.

My point is that the smaller language communities probably couldn't create
enough content by themselves without having the opportunity to translate
manuals written by the larger language communities. And if the goal is
something like a reasonable coverage of at least all of the most commonly
used FLOSS programs the task of producing the original content would be
huge.


> --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.
>

I remember an important point of management advice from benevolent dictator
Linus Torvalds: "First off, I'd suggest buying "Seven Habits of Highly
Successful People", and NOT read it. Burn it, it's a great symbolic
gesture." I don't know what he meant or if this has any relevance to the
discussion here, I just had to quote that one sooner or later.

But I don't know if forking documentation projects would be a good idea. It
would seem a waste of resources if different people were making different
versions of the same original content. Technically it wouldn't be a fork if
they didn't take the content with them. Are there any examples about this?
And this cannot be compared to encyclopedia-like wikis at all. The process
of writing a longer manual seems to be completely different from making an
amount of encyclopedia-like articles about the use of computers.

--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.
>

I think that the translation process isn't really very complicated. Just
make a copy of the manual and then translate it. I noticed very small
differences in procedure such as some people absolutely want to copy their
section of the manual into a word processor in order to use their
translation tools properly. Of course there are some huge differences
between languages, for an example machine translation is pretty much
completely useless with Finnish language, while it seems to work quite well
with some bigger languages.

-- 
Best Regards
Tomi Toivio
Open Source Coordinator
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
tomi at flossmanuals.net
+358445488856
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