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

[Tomi Toivio]

2012/4/23 Daniel James <daniel.james at sourcefabric.org>

> Hi Mick,
>
>
> 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 find Q&A sites in the style of Stack Overflow extremely useful. I think
that they do not "compete" with long manuals. It would be hard to
understand what they are saying without reading some longer manuals first.
;)

The idea of using an open source Q&A forum like Shapado (http://shapado.com/)
to answer end user questions about open source software in Finnish is
really interesting. But that would go beyond the scope of the FLOSS Manuals
project. Or would it?


> 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).
>

I think so too. For me it seems like teachers and students will probably be
the most active group at least in the Finnish site.


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

We use Moodle every time there is an university collaboration. What kind of
integration do you mean?

I don't know if there is a need for any kind of integration on a technical
level, it is more like you always end up using the resources of the project
you are collaborating with. To integrate one somehow into Booktype would be
a huge task and then you would always end up using the Moodle of the school
you are currently working with.

-- 
Best Regards
Tomi Toivio
Open Source Coordinator
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
tomi at flossmanuals.net
+358453536625
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