[FM Discuss] federated publishing

Mon Oct 10 06:46:47 PDT 2011

thanks heaps Andy,

The edits you made a great...i altered a few bits (see below)...if you 
(or anyone) has a minute i'd appreciate any more edits to clear it up (I 
think its close)

adam

Federated Publishing

Changes are hammering the publishing industry, which is belatedly
adapting to change--but only moving around incrementally, staying
inside or a few steps outside its traditional walls. FLOSS Manuals is
trying something quite different, placing ourselves squarely inside a
new space where content is free (libre) as far as feasibly possible.
The space in which FLOSS Manuals operates can be termed Federated
Publishing.

Federated Publishing is not a model, but is better considered a
network of models, enabling multiple approaches to content production,
distribution, and consumption. At this point, as we see it within
FLOSS Manuals, the space is enabled by four core elements:

* Digitally networked corpora of works
* Interoperable free/libre licensed content
* Federated open book production and "publishing" platforms
* People participating

This space facilitates traditional, established book production
techniques while fueling radically different approaches.

Federated Publishing is currently best illustrated, I believe, in
FLOSS Manuals, an organization I founded five years ago. Starting as
an alternative to publishers for communities that were inadequately
served by them, we have found ourselves migrating back into the field
of publishing, with significant reforms to offer. We have broken many
established practices because we didn't know any better. We have
developed our own web-based writing, book production, publishing and 
coordination tools to meet our goals. At the five-year point, our 
position vis-a-vis traditional industries is ambiguous, finding us 
simultaneously inside and outside
publishing.

In the FLOSS Manuals system, books have no Authors--and no Publishers 
(capital A capital P) for that matter. No one really cares much about 
attribution. But
quality is high, and perhaps most important, books *live*--they are
constantly updated and improved. Books are also produced fast - in fact, 
high quality text books can be are produced in times measured in days, 
hours, or minutes.

Books have multiple channels and multiple contexts. Content is shifted
between contexts rapidly and easily, people get paid, reputations get
made, and economies evolve. Books migrate with little effort across
languages, taken to them by eager volunteers who want to bring their
benefits to their own communities.

All the content is free, we provide all the tools we make under a free
license as well, and we make it easy for you to take anything you want
from us. Our website, templates, books, community, platform--whatever
you like.

Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network 
theory, which itself is born out of a need to transform proprietary 
network services into a modern Free Software critique. Federated 
Publishing is not in itself a critique, it is an active and vibrant 
practice - but it is born from this ideological legacy.

Federated Publishing was anticipated by this astonishing passage from
Marshall McLuhan (“Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966),” 
interview with Robert Fulford, May 8, 1966, on CBC’s This Hour Has Seven 
Days):

  “Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have
  been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone,
  describe your interests, your needs, your problems … and they at once
  Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world,
  all the latest material for you personally, not as something to be
  put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct
  personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic
  conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.”

Many quote this passage as a prophesy of the internet to come.  However 
it is not a vision of the internet, it is a vision of the book and 
Federated Publishing.

While FLOSS Manuals has grown substantially, expanded its scope beyond
the free software movement for which it as created, and learned how to
increase the size and depth of each book we produce, traditional
publishing has gone off in different direction, trying to invent a new
proprietary future for itself. We can now understand this
proprietorship, given the contrast presented by Federated Publishing,
in a broad sense that goes far beyond closed copyrights. In fact 
proprietary behaviour also pervades the domain of open licenses in free 
culture. The proprietary attitude dominates the search for new 
distribution formats and economic models, reward systems for authors and 
others, and fuels an unwillingness to make content interoperable on a 
technical, legal, or social cultural level. Tying yourself to the 
content you produce and preventing its freedom like this is a tiring and 
resource-consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and 
knowledge.

FLOSS Manuals actively encourages anyone to make a book, a chapter, or
an edit. We encourage anyone to alter a book for the needs of an
individual or a community, to take it to their own domain, translate
it, reuse it, break it up, voice multiple discordant positions and
concerns within the same covers, and break the use of 'I' as a
dominant identifier for a single individual author. Or just take the
book without changing a word and make yourself a million euro, yen, or 
dollars. No problems.

We aim to generate federated, interoperable corpora enabled by common
sense technology and an increasing consciousness that a book is 'ours'
to do as 'I', you, we, or they want. We are starting with free manuals
and aim to provide an example of what is possible within and between
domains.

In this environment books transform - they migrate across contexts,
they are translated, they are kept alive, they are used the world over
to help people learn about free software, they are of extremely good
quality, they provide economies for those that wish to pursue the
seemingly radical practices.

Does it sound impossible to have an economy here? Is this another free
culture revolution without a strategy to pay the rent? FLOSS Manuals is 
finding revenues from organizations that benefit from the free flow of
information. It benefits from the incredibly tight integration of
effort made possible by the Internet, a level of integration Marshall
McLuhan might not have been able to imagine. The Net has brought
social production networks to a such a scale that the person on the
other end of McLuhan's telephone line is an asynchronous network of
people you never met, and you as well. You make books with others, you
collectively decide what a book is and what goes in it, and others add
ideas and content that either you don't know how to produce or can't
produce in time.

People pay for that, and they pay for you to help them do that. It is
the beginning of Federated Publishing services, not the end of
publishing.

On 10/09/2011 10:43 PM, Andy Oram wrote:
> Adam, I started editing the document for the Frankurt fair that you sent
> a couple days ago. I discovered some things that didn't flow and found
> myself making bigger and bigger changes. I don't know whether what I
> came up with expresses what you want. But here are ideas for you and
> others to consider.
>
> Andy
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net

-- 

--
Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
Project Manager, Booki
Book Sprint Facilitator
mobile :+ 49 177 4935122
identi.ca : @eset
booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam

http://www.flossmanuals.net
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