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

[Edward Mokurai Cherlin]

On Wed, April 24, 2013 5:00 am, Micah Roth wrote:
> Dear flossmanuals,
>
> My name is Micah Roth. I am a US Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) currently
> serving in the Philippines.

Welcome. I was a Volunteer in the Korea-II group in 1967. I am working
on a project for Open Educational Resources for education worldwide,
with One Laptop Per Child and Sugar Labs. I have been in contact with
the Peace Corps about the possibility of using some Peace Corps
materials that are currently in copyright Hell, where the owner has
gone out of business and the law provides no way to transfer the
rights to anyone else.

> 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.

My program for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs has been using Booki,
and I am trying to organize a switch the the more capable Booktype. I
first engaged in an FM sprint on How to Bypass Internet Censorship,
with Adam leading the sprint.

> 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.

What licenses will be used for these publications?

> 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 have not been trained in the system administration functions needed
for a sprint, but I understand authorship, editing, creating
illustrations, and more. I am willing to help in any way that I can,
including participating in sprints online. We can discuss whether it
would be appropriate for the Peace Corps sprints to use the Sugar Labs
instance of Booki, and whether I can get a Booktype set up for your
use.

> 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.

Do you have time to participate in one of ours, either FM or Sugar
Labs, before then?

> Thanks a ton!
>
> ~Micah

We should probably discuss this privately, since the Sugar Labs server
is off-topic for the FM list.

--
Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks