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

[Anne GOLDENBERG]

Hi there,
thank you for those clarifying reflexions.

As a facilitator with different methodologies, as a free culture activist
and as a social scientist who has worked on collaborative practices, I would
be very interested to work on this question of making Booki and FM working
on a larger and more sustainable scale. Also, I've just been trained by
Elisa from FM-fr (booksprint in Pure Data-fr and Scribus-fr) in order to
also facilitate booksprints in North America.

Thought, I haven't been able to fill the
doodle<http://www.doodle.com/uc4cwpbpsbvbx2tu>because none of those
date fits me.
I'm french but I leave in Montreal, travelling back to Europe twice a year,
for a few weeks each time.
I'm going to leave Europe by the end of august but my planning is already
full (with a possible meeting with Adam at the end of August).
I'm planning to be back in Europe by the end of December for facilitation,
collaborative and booksprint related projects.
End of december- january would be a better time for me to join.
If that would be a possible meeting period, I would love to be part of that
reflexion.

To hopefully soon,

Anne


2011/7/25 Daniel James <daniel.james at sourcefabric.org>

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.flossmanuals.net/pipermail/discuss-flossmanuals.net/attachments/20110725/2c3e90ec/attachment.htm>