[FM Discuss] FM meeting end of Sept/early October?

[Daniel James]

Hi Helen,

> so it's up to all of us to take on a slice of ownership, make the
> meeting happen, & front up for some of the work.

It might be beneficial to have an online discussion beforehand about
where the contributors see this project going, particularly if Adam
intends to take a step back. Then people will know whether there's an
in-person meeting worth having.

My personal view is that any project has to be put on a sustainable
financial footing, in order to ensure its long-term survival. From my
experience, most people cannot sustain more than a year or two of
intensive voluntary work. Also, the right person to start a project is
not necessarily the right person to sustain and grow it towards
self-sufficiency - these roles perhaps require different personal qualities.

It seems to me that Flossmanuals and Booki have great potential.
Technical writing is a valuable skill, and opening it up to
collaborative authoring and simultaneous translation might make the old
workflows redundant (just as Wikipedia has killed the conventional
encyclopedia).

However in the current state, I don't see FM being able to take it's
rightful place in the forefront of that new model. It's just not visible
enough to the publishing industry or the book-reading public, and it
doesn't have much of a business model that I can see. Running book
sprints might pay a few people every now and again, but that income
doesn't scale well. (There are far more readers than writers, we hope).

What I would suggest is that after registering as a formal non-profit
organisation (did this happen already?) that an experienced fund-raiser
is recruited on a commission basis. The aim would be to raise just
enough cash to get the complete Booki system in a shape where anyone
with a little LAMP experience could deploy it. Right now it's just too
complicated and mysterious.

There has to be a high-profile campaign to persuade well-known Free
Software projects and software corporations to adopt Booki as their
documentation platform of choice. This might require the recruitment of
dedicated deployment support and PR teams.

Then, there has to be a solid business model so that any time a member
of the public buys a book made with Booki, some income flows back to
sustain the development of the tools. Right now, that money is flowing
back to Microsoft and Adobe, even when the book is about Free Software.

Finally, there has to be a link to revenue in the end-user training
market. This market is huge, and FM authors are in a great position to
benefit from it (folks, put your hand up if you've ever been on a
training course where the trainer didn't know what they were talking
about, and was just reading from someone else's textbook).

What I would hope is that Adam can stay in the leadership role for long
enough to see the project build a solid foundation. As much as I enjoy
the collaborative model, I do acknowledge the role of leaders in
bringing everyone else along.

So, what does everyone else think? :-)

Cheers!

Daniel