Federated Publishing [AO: The beginning is fuzzy, but I picked out two theme: the wave of change in traditional publishing and a contrast between it and FM.] Changes are hammering the publishing industry, which is belatedly adapting to change--but only moving around incrementally, staying inside or a few steps outside its traditional walls. FLOSS Manuals is trying something quite different, placing ourselves squarely inside a new space where content is free (libre) as far as feasibly possible. The space in which FLOSS Manuals operates can be termed Federated Publishing. Federated Publishing is not a model, but is better considered a network of models, enabling multiple approaches to content production, distribution, and consumption. At this point, as we see it within FLOSS Manuals, the space is enabled by four core elements: * Digitally networked corpora of works Interoperable free/libre * licensed content Federated open book production and "publishing" * platforms People participating This space facilitates traditional, established book production techniques while fueling radically different approaches. [AO: We need to establish what FM actually is. I might have preferred to do it earlier, but I let the definition of Federated Publishing take the top spot in the article.] Federated Publishing is currently best illustrated, I believe, in FLOSS Manuals, an organization I founded five years ago. Starting as an alternative to publishers for communities that were inadequately served by them, we have found ourselves migrating back into the field of publishing, with significant reforms to offer. We have broken many established practices because we didn't know any better. We have developed our own writing, layout, and coordination tools to meet our goals. At the five-year point, our position vis-a-vis traditional industries is ambiguous, finding us simultaneously inside and outside publishing. In the FLOSS Manuals system, books have no authors--and no publishers for that matter. No one really cares much about attribution. But quality is high, and perhaps most important, books *live*--they are constantly updated and improved. In fact, high quality text books can be are produced in times measured in days, hours, or minutes. Books have multiple channels and multiple contexts. Content is shifted between contexts rapidly and easily, people get paid, reputations get made, and economies evolve. Books migrate with little effort across languages, taken to them by eager volunteers who want to bring their benefits to their own communities. All the content is free, we provide all the tools we make under a free license as well, and we make it easy for you to take anything you want from us. Our website, templates, books, community, platform--whatever you like. [AO: The stuff about the critique was too hard for me to understand and I gave up on it, but you can revise what I've done here if I left out any important point.] Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network theory, which attempts to rescue the information produced by cooperating individuals from closed, proprietary network services. It was also inspired by the free software movement, and takes from the founding organization of that field--the Free Software Foundation--the license used on FLOSS Manuals collaborations, the GNU General Public License. The imposition of a single license permits readers to combine any parts of different FLOSS Manuals works into creative, new combinations. Federated Publishing was anticipated by this astonishing passage from Marshall McLuhan: [AO: What source?] “Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems … and they at once Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.” While FLOSS Manuals has grown substantially, expanded its scope beyond the free software movement for which it as created, and learned how to increase the size and depth of each book we produce, traditional publishing has gone off in different direction, trying to invent a new proprietary future for itself. We can now understand this proprietorship, given the contrast presented by Federated Publishing, in a broad sense that goes far beyond closed copyrights. The proprietary attitude dominates publishers' search for new distribution formats and economic models, their reward system for authors and others, and their unwillingness to make content interoperable on a technical, legal, or social cultural level. Tying ourselves to the content we produce is a tiring and resource-consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and knowledge. [AO: "it is a question of domain branding strategies within free culture" dropped out because I didn't know what to do with it.] FLOSS Manuals actively encourages anyone to make a book, a chapter, or an edit. We encourage anyone to alter a book for the needs of an individual or a community, to take it to their own domain, translate it, reuse it, break it up, voice multiple discordant positions and concerns within the same covers, and break the use of 'I' as a dominant identifier for a single individual author. Or just take the book without changing a word and make yourself a million. No problems. [AO: A million what? Books? Euros?] We aim to generate federated, interoperable corpora enabled by common sense technology and an increasing consciousness that a book is 'ours' to do as 'I', you, we, or they want. We are starting with free manuals and aim to provide an example of what is possible within and between domains. In this environment books transform - they migrate across contexts, they are translated, they are kept alive, they are used the world over to help people learn about free software, they are of extremely good quality, they provide economies for those that wish to pursue the seemingly radical practices. Does it sound impossible to have an economy here? Is this another free culture revolution without a strategy to pay the rent? Although founded by grants like most new ventures, FLOSS Manuals is finding funds from organizations that benefit from the free flow of information. It benefits from the incredibly tight integration of effort made possible by the Internet, a level of integration Marshall McLuhan might not have been able to imagine. The Net has brought social production networks to a such a scale that the person on the other end of McLuhan's telephone line is an asynchronous network of people you never met, and you as well. You make books with others, you collectively decide what a book is and what goes in it, and others add ideas and content that either you don't know how to produce or can't produce in time. People pay for that, and they pay for you to help them do that. It is the beginning of Federated Publishing services, not the end of publishing.