[FM Discuss] Forking an official manual for translation in FM?

[Daniel James]

Hi Mick,

> It makes a lot of sense,
> workbooks and supporting trainers is a great focus.

My experience is that there is less interest in long, linear manuals
these days. It's just possible that fat textbooks may have been an
artefact of the economics of printing, i.e. a 400 page book might be
more profitable than a 200 page book, due to a higher shelf price and
the way that revenue is divided in the book trade. Of course, e-books
may turn out to have different economics.

I'm also seeing more interest in quick video tutorials, but perhaps
that's due to the ease of making screencasts, and/or shortening
attention spans.

So to stay relevant, FM may have to become more demand-driven, and that
might mean creating courseware (group-read manuals), instead of
single-reader manuals. That might suit our multi-contributor model very
well. (Teachers and trainers have a clear incentive to improve a manual,
because they will probably be using the manual more than once, unlike an
'end user' reader).

Maybe Moodle integration is something we should be looking at too.

Cheers!

Daniel