[FM Discuss] FM Newsletter 2012 Issue 01

[John Curwood]

FLOSS Manuals Newsletter February 2012


   1.

      Booki becomes Booktype

   2.

      News from the FM communities.

   3.

      Freedom fone the book.

   4.

      A note from the editor

   5.

      FM in 2012.

   6.

      FM manual spotlight

   7.

      Upcomming Events.

   8.

      Adam's section


----------------------
Booki becomes Booktype
----------------------
Recently FLOSS manuals teamed up with Sourcefabric to champion the 
development of FLOSS manuals' book creation and publishing software 
Booki. This has allowed the FM community to focus on what they do best, 
create outstanding free manuals for free software.

Sourcefabraic, who already have a proven track record developing open 
source tools for media organisations will provide ongoing development of 
this outstanding book publishing platform. Since taking over development 
Sourcefabric have worked hard to release the next version of Booki, 
which now comes with a new name, Booktype. Booktype will be familiar to 
users of Booki as it still comes with a similar interface, but includes 
many improvements and bug fixes along the way.

To check out Booktype, visit www.booki.cc <http://www.booki.cc/>.
Visit Sourcefabric's home page at www.sourcefabric.org 
<http://www.sourcefabric.org/>.
You can also check out manuals for Sourcfabric's existing software 
(Airtime, Newscoop, and Campsite) at FM (en.flossmanuals.net).

-------------------------
News from the communities
-------------------------
The Finnish FM community have been hard at work in 2012 already. To 
start with, they have come out with a first. FM's first LibreOffice 
manual. Hosted by the Document Foundation, LibreOffice appeared in early 
2011 as a fork of OpenOffice.org and has been making big waves in the 
office application community.

The LibreOffice manual (Currently in Finnish only), can be found at 
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/libreoffice/index. Since LibreOffice is a 
fork of OpenOffice.org, the LibreOffice manual is also a fork of the FM 
openoffice.org Manual (http://fi.flossmanuals.net/openoffice/index).

Finnish FM have also been working hard to translate the Scribus manual 
into Finnish from French.

See the manual at: http://fi.flossmanuals.net/scribus/

This brings the total number of manuals translated into Finnish to 32, 
comprising of approximatedly 2000 pages of opensource documentation. 
This is an amazing effort by the Finnish FM community. Finnish FM's next 
target is the OpenStreetMap manual.

Earlier this month FLOSS Manuals Francophone translated the 
OpenStreetMap manual into French. The hope of this manual is that it 
will increase the reach of OpenStreetMap in french speaking countries.

---------------------
Freedom Fone the book
---------------------
A recent addition to the English language FLOSS Manuals site is the 
Freedom Fone manual (http://en.flossmanuals.net/freedom-fone/). So what 
is Freedom Fone? This excerpt, taken from the manual explains:
"Freedom Fone allows anyone with a phone to access or contribute 
information on a specific issue 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It 
takes advantage of audio and text to address language and literacy 
barriers when reaching out to marginalised audiences that don't have 
access to other media. No internet access is required by either you or 
your audience for this."
Freedom Fone was conceived by the Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe. Kubatana 
aims to inspire positive social change by sharing information and ideas 
via Internet, email, mobile phones and print publications. An Epic 
software such as Fredom Fone requires an epic sprint and this was the 
case with the Freedom fone BookSprint. The Sprint took place in the 
remote eastern highlands of Zimbabwe, in a location that had no mobile 
reception, no direcet internet access and frequent power cuts and 
involved 11 participants from six different countries. The resultant 
manual is a 30,000 word masterpiece and can read at en.flossmanuals.net.

-------------
Editors Notes
-------------
It's been a busy start to 2012, Finnish FM has been working hard on 
translating manuals, and creating some new ones as well. FLOSS Manuals 
has also teamed up with Sourcefabric to continute the development of our 
Book creation and publishing platform a new version of which became 
available this month. This is my first FM newsletter and it has been a 
big job, but a fun one putting it together. I particularly enjoyed 
reading the OpenStreetMap manual and using open street map. There is 
some great content at FM so read and enjoy. -John

----------
FM in 2012
----------
2012 is going to be a busy year for FM with plans to start up more FM 
language communities, more BookSprints and more BookConferences. Stay 
tuned for the exciting adventures of FM.

-----------------------------------
FM Manual spotlight -- OpenStreetMap
-----------------------------------
The reason for choosing to write this first spotlight on the 
OpenStreetMap manual is simple, I love maps. Ever since I was a I loved 
looking a maps and exploring maps.

Enough about me, OpenStreetMap provides maps of the globe similar to 
Google's maps, the key difference is that anyone can contribute to the 
mapping information. This means that if roadworks have updated the 
street layout in your neighborhood (Which happened to me just before 
Christmas), you can update OpenStreetMap to reflect those changes. 
Because of this, the data on OpenStreetMap is constantly being refined 
and improved, giving us greater and greater detail about our 
neighborhoods, communities and planet.

The Manual can be found at http://en.flossmanuals.net/openstreetmap/ and 
gives a comprehensive overview of openstreetmap. After an intorduction 
to OpenStreetMap, you are shown how to edit the data in OpenStreetMap. 
This could be as simple as udating the information about an existing 
road, point of interest or location, to adding new locations, road and 
objects to the map. I was hooked. After reading the opening chapters I 
had to create an account and make some edits to the maps of my 
neighbourhood.

There are many different means to edit OpenStreetMap and the manual 
explores several of these including: Editing online at the OpenStreetMap 
website, using the offline editor, a GPS device, editing apps for mobile 
devices and for those without GPS or smart-phones there are walking maps.

With editing comprehensively covered, the manual explores the ways that 
OpenStreetMap data can be accessed and used, such as printing a map with 
index for offline use and various mobile apps. My wife's smartphone is 
now full of apps that either edit or utilise OpenStreetMap data.

Finally the manual looks at the open street map model for those 
interested in developing applications that harness or contribute to 
OpenStreetMaps, This includes a look at customising an instance of the 
OpenStreetMap editor for your own website that is optimised for editing 
the data conveyed or used by your sites purpose.

Even with a great manual there is always more to add, for example the 
many mobile apps that utilise and display OpenStreetMaps' data. If you 
want to contribute to the OpenStreetMap manual login to FLOSS Manuals, 
go to http://booki.flossmanuals.net/openstreetmap/_edit/ and start typing.

Catch you next month.

John


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