[FM Discuss] Rotterdam LGRU meeting & mini-sprint

[Mick - FLOSS Manuals]

I just wrote this to eric who was there for the beginning but I wanted
to quickly send it to the list.

There was the idea of a FM meet up at the 'Libre Graphics Research Unit'
meeting. But in the end it didn't fit in with the scope of the meeting.

Sacha, Eric and I represented FLOSS Manuals. In the end we made up quite
a lot of the programme, the text of which is here.
http://lgru.net/archives/2826

I drew heavily on Adam's blog posts to talk about federated publishing.
from blog.booki.cc - AND - in case you are not reading them from the
posts at http://www.booksprints.net/ .

I got quite a long presentation together that I guess I can roll out
now. It would be good to polish up the slideshow as well.

In the preparation for the meeting we were persuaded to do a 'sprint' as
part of the gathering. This wouldn't be a Book Sprint, as such, as the
time constraints would not have allowed it. So we came up with the term
'mini-sprint', indicating that this is using some of the methodology of
Book Sprints without having the goal of a completed book.

These time constrictions bring advantages and disadvantages. I'd like to
spend a bit more time to thing about them before writing them up. One of
them was the choice of a silly working title
'something-about-the-book-maybe', which stuck unfortunately as we had no
time to think of anything better.

The work to prepare the subject was fast paced, and well hectic. There
are some photos up here -
http://gallery3.constantvzw.org/index.php/LGRU-abstracting-craft/IMG_1232_DxO
http://gallery3.constantvzw.org/index.php/LGRU-abstracting-craft/DSC01651_DxO
http://gallery3.constantvzw.org/index.php/LGRU-abstracting-craft/IMG_1244_DxO

The plan was to go from really rough idea to a list of sections /
chapters to jump into in 60 mins.

The group did start writing just over an hour into the first session on
Friday afternoon. The internet got cut at 6pm. This acted as a hard cut
off point, which was probably a good thing given the dynamics of the
weekend (more on this later). By this point a lot of really good content
had been generated.

On Saturday, unfortunately we got a really late start. It was hard to
get back in the zone. I felt nervous about convening people to make it
happen. However the participants jumped right back on the horse and got
to it.

We also got some good illustrations for it too from one of the artists
there. But, in short the time constrictions made me focus on encouraging
the individual work of the writers taking part.

Here is a link to what was generated at the end of Sat.
http://objavi.booki.cc/books/somethingaboutthebookmaybe-en-2012.09.29-15.23.39.pdf


and here too the evolving version - 
http://booki.cc/something-about-the-book-maybe

I'll try to write some more reflections on this 'mini-sprint' for a
write up in the near future. All the aspects of the Book Sprint were
there but with the clear limitations of time. It was important to almost
celebrate these limitations in a way. We had a laugh anyway and
generated and consolidated some really good ideas that had been flying
around for those days in other discussions.

nice one
Mick

-- 
Mick Chesterman - mick at flossmanuals.net
mickfuzz [skype]
m3shrom at indy.im [status.net / identi.ca] - @mickfuzzz [twitter]

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