FLOSS Manuals books published after three-day sprint

The final day of the FLOSS Manuals documentation sprint at Google began with a bit of a reprieve from Sprintmeister Adam Hyde’s dictum that we should do no new writing. He allowed us to continue work till noon, time that the KDE team spent partly in heated arguments over whether we had provided enough coverage of key topics (the KDE project architecture, instructions for filing bug reports, etc.), partly in scrutinizing dubious material the book had inherited from the official documentation, and (at least a couple of us) actually writing material for chapters that readers may or may not find useful, such as a glossary.

I worried yesterday that the excitement of writing a complete book would be succeeded by the boring work of checking flow and consistency. Some drudgery was involved, but the final reading allowed groups to revisit their ways of presenting concepts and bringing in the reader.

Having done everything I thought I could do for the KDE team, I switched to OpenStreetMap, who produced a short, nicely paced, well-illustrated user guide. I think it’s really cool that Google, which invests heavily in its own mapping service, helps OpenStreetMap as well. (They are often represented in Google Summer of Code.)

After dinner we started publishing our books. The new publication process at FLOSS Manuals loads the books not only to the FLOSS Manuals main page but to Lulu for purchase.

Publishing books at doc sprint
Publishing books at doc sprint

Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process. As described by founder Adam Hyde in a blog posting today, Visualising your book, recently added tools that help participants and friends follow the progress of the book (you can view a list of chapters edited on an RSS feed, for instance) and get a sense of what was done. For instance, a timeline with circles representing chapter edits shows you which chapters had the most edits and when activity took place. (Pierre Commenge created the visualization for FLOSS Manuals.)

Work done on FLOSS Manuals book
Work done on FLOSS Manuals book

The four books are short, but they didn’t exist at all three days ago
(although parts were taken from existing documentation). They are:

Participants at doc sprint
Participants at doc sprint

(All my postings from this sprint are listed in a bit.ly bundle.)

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