[FM Discuss] federated publishing

[adam]

hey :)

On 10/08/2011 05:24 AM, Anne GOLDENBERG wrote:
> Very intersesting, indeed.
> It also reminds me of the "re-narration
> Web"<http://janastu.org/technoscience/index.php/Alipi>t (which was
> presented at RMLL 2011, Strasbourg by Dinesh ),
> a project<http://a11y.in/><http://janastu.org/technoscience/index.php/Alipi>for
> a decentralised and federated mode of translation.
>
> For the text,
> I'm just discovering the project, which sounds very cool.
> One point : I'm surely missing some context, but I'm not sure I understand
> the question of new proprietary future // proprietorship.  "This
> proprietorship is to be taken in the broadest possible understanding".
> What is  this property refering to ? is it a critic of traditionnal form or
> a new definition ?
> I guess it is also my approximate understanding of english,

We generally talk about free software and proprietary software. We 
seldom talk of free books and proprietary books. Closed copyright is 
strong proprietorship (ownership) but there are other strategies that 
seem weaker but can be every bit as strong or at least 'not as free as 
they make out'. for example free books that have a cc license that are 
only available as PDF. I waffled a bit about this here:
http://blog.booki.cc/2010/09/free-as-in-not/

these behaviours are proprietary (non sharing) behaviours as far as i am 
concerned and should be critiqued openly by free culture in the same way 
as all-rights-reserved license choices are

adam


>
> anyway, cheers to this project.
> it seem that this recent meeting was great !
>
> Anne
>
>
> 2011/10/7 Janet Swisher<jmswisher at gmail.com>
>
>> I just found out about Ward Cunningham's latest project, which is a
>> federated wiki:
>> http://wardcunningham.github.com/
>>
>> I find it interesting how his ideas are similar to, and different
>> from, those expressed in booki. If you are talking about federation
>> and wikis, someone may bring this up, so good to be prepared.
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 11:27 PM, adam<adam at flossmanuals.net>  wrote:
>>> hi,
>>>
>>> I am presenting Booki and FM at the Frankfurt book fair and put together
>> a
>>> text as a starting point of what I wanted to say...included below...any
>>> comments/critique welcome...
>>>
>>> adam
>>>
>>>
>>> Federated Publishing
>>> Instead of talking about new book publishing models and moving
>> incrementally
>>> within or slightly without its walls lets try something else, place
>>> ourselves in a space completely *inside* the space where content is as
>> far
>>> as feasibly possible free (libre) - one such space for this I would like
>> to
>>> call 'federated publishing'.
>>>
>>> Federated Publishing is not a 'model' it is in fact a network of models -
>>> enabling multiple approaches of content production, distribution and
>>> consumption. It is a space enabled by four core elements - digitally
>>> networked corpora, interoperable libre licensed content, federated open
>> book
>>> production and 'publishing' platforms, and people. It is a space that
>>> enables traditional established book production techniques but fuels new
>>> approaches which are radically different - a space where books have no
>>> authors, attribution is not really anything anyone cares about, quality
>> is
>>> high, books live - constantly updated and improved, books magically
>> migrate
>>> across languages, high quality text books are produced in exceedingly
>> short
>>> times measured in minutes, hours or days, books have no publisher but
>>> multiple channels and multiple contexts, content is shifted between
>> contexts
>>> rapidly and easily, people get paid, reputations get made, economies
>> exist.
>>>
>>> This is not pie in the sky. This exists now. FLOSS Manuals has
>> inadvertently
>>> found itself tinkering inside of publishing for the past 5 years. We have
>>> broken many established practices because we didn't know any better. We
>> have
>>> developed tools that don't imagine a future but were built to provide
>>> sensible pathways to what we wanted to achieve. We now surface after 5
>> years
>>> of this, look around and realise we are simultaneously inside and outside
>>> publishing. We articulate this as 'Federated Publishing'.
>>>
>>> Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network jargon,
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Publishing is trying to invent a new proprietary future. This
>> proprietorship
>>> is to be taken in the broadest possible understanding. It is not just a
>>> question of closed copyright finding new distribution formats and
>> economic
>>> models, it is a question of domain branding strategies within free
>> culture
>>> and the unwillingness to make content interoperable on a technical,
>> legal,
>>> or social cultural level.
>>>
>>> We are tied to the need to tie ourselves to the content we produce. We
>>> enable the commit bit whenever we can by default and it is a tiring and
>>> resource consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and
>>> knowledge.
>>>
>>> Federated Publishing is a future we are working in now at FLOSS Manuals.
>> We
>>> actively encourage anyone to make a book, chapter, edit. We encourage
>> anyone
>>> to fork a book, take it to their own domain, translate it, reuse it,
>> break
>>> it, voice multiple discordant positions and concerns within the same
>> covers,
>>> break the use of 'I' as a dominant identifier for a single individual
>>> author, take the book without changing a word and make your a million. 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, them, or we want. We are starting with free manuals and aim to
>>> provide an example of what is possible within and between domains.
>>>
>>> We currently work like this. All the content is free, we use one license
>> to
>>> increase interoperability and we discourage talk of licenses to encourage
>>> productivity, we provide all the tools we make for free and make it easy
>> for
>>> you to take anything you want from us. Our website templates, books,
>>> community, platform...whatever you like.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Sound impossible to have an economy here? Another free culture revolution
>>> without a strategy to pay the rent? Consider Marshall McLuhans
>> astonishing
>>> vision :
>>>
>>> “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.”
>>>
>>> That was not a vision of the internet, it is a vision of the book. The
>>> internet does not work like that. Books can. This is the way I have paid
>> my
>>> rent for the last two years. By making books that are an accumulation of
>>> everything that you need in a book. There is one major difference and
>>> something that Marshall Mcluhan may not have interwined into this thread
>> -
>>> the net has brought social production networks to a scale that the person
>> on
>>> the other end of McLuhans phone line is an asynchronous network of people
>>> you never met, and it is you. You make books with others, you decide what
>> a
>>> book is and what goes in it, others add ideas and content that either you
>>> cant produce or cant produce in time. 100% original source books are
>> created
>>> in days. Others in minutes.
>>>
>>> People pay for that. They pay for you to help them do that. It is the
>>> beginning of Federated Publishing services, it is the end of nothing.
>>>
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>
>
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-- 

--
Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
Project Manager, Booki
Book Sprint Facilitator
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