[FM Discuss] Recommendations for switching to a good documentation system for US Peace Corps Philippines

[Micah Roth]

Dear flossmanuals,

My name is Micah Roth. I am a US Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) currently
serving in the Philippines. Peace Corps Philippines has recently decided to
initiate the move to ereaders instead of hard-copy training materials for
our training events.They saw that the ereader model they bought (the 6"
Kindle 3 standard, I believe) has support for PDF and figured they could
just save their doc/docx files as PDF and be done with it. When that failed
miserably, somebody asked me what they could do about it and I've been
researching the process for a few months in my extra time.

I have discovered many references on the Internet to markup-style
documentation methods that incorporate DITA and Docbook, but haven't really
found a good way to teach people to use those systems. I found Wikipedia's
export to epub function and what plugins would be required to make a local
installation of mediawiki do that, but I'm not sure this is the best
method. And of course, I found the awesome booksprint concept and I have
read a bit about Booki, Pressbooks, and Booktype - but don't know what tool
to choose. I would really appreciate any feedback on this stuff I can get.

This is coming to a head because I was told today that we will have two
official booksprints: one for Education, and another for
Children-Youth-Families and Environment. These booksprints will be to
create the Technical Binder used for the next batch of Volunteers' main
trainig events. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to actually *do* a
booksprint - at this point, it's just a word. So, is there like a manual
out there for how to set up and execute a booksprint? If they don't have
guidance all that's going to end up happening is everybody plopping
.doc/.docx files in a folder and then one unlucky soul copy-pasting them
all into one giant doc, and then printing it. Oy, disastre.

I will be available to attend one of the booksprints (the second one I
mentioned) and I have been asked to facilitate it - so any instructions,
advice, tips, etc would be highly welcome, since this is my first rodeo.

Thanks a ton!

~Micah
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