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We are happy to announce new manuals in FLOSS Manuals that have also been translated into Farsi for the Internews Europe, Human Rights Connect project.

The first is a summary of Firefox with a focus on security and offline use. The second a short guide to the collaborative writing tool Etherpad. 

We hope that these manuals can help new users to find out and master these fantastic Free Software tools and to be of use to projects and organisations that already use them to better train their colleagues to get up to speed.

At the beginning of November, I travelled to Edinburgh to attend Remediating the Social, the culmination conference of a three year European research project, ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice).

I was invited to speak on a panel titled “Writing Together Differently”, as a consequence of my involvement with The Digital Manual (a research project related to ELMCIP). In this capacity I have multiple hats on - UpStage, make-shift, FLOSS Manuals … and for the ELMCIP conference I found myself referring to many of my own creative projects as well as to the online tools that I use to collaborate, organisationally and artistically. When I began to write notes for my presentation and think about what “writing together differently” means for me, it occurred to me to use etherpad (a real-time online collaborative writing platform) to compile my notes, to share this with others, and to demonstrate it during the presentation. I created a pad, which you can access here (and contribute to! it needs to be updated at least once a month or it will be deleted …) then invited a few friends to come online and contribute during my talk. Six people joined me, three of them actively; you can play the timeslider of the pad in order to see how the writing was “performed”.

I gave a presentation on how FLOSS Manuals uses Booktype and ePubs at a discussion panel at the Cetis 2014 conference. Here is Wilbert’s write up of the panel. When does a book become a web platform.  This links to a lot of the work Adam Hyde has done around advocating for the use of epubs.

I also formulated a bit of an argument around epubs and OER (Open educational resources) which is posted as part of an email discussion on the Open Education email list here.

(This is a translation of the French FM newsletters; French-speeakers may wish to visit the French FM site).

Hi all - Welcome to all new subscribers to the Francophone FLOSS Manuals list.

This mail out brings you a few of our updates.

>> We have now have an online bookshop - http://flossmanualsfr.net
>> This is also embeded in our home page - http://fr.flossmanuals.net
>> The home page also gets an additional column listing the printed books available.

In tre giorni, dal venerdi 19 alla domenica 21 ottobre 2012 abbiamo tradotto collettivamente il Floss Manuale di Scribus.

Ringraziamo di cuore i partecipanti che sono venuti a Brescia al Centro Arte & Tecnologia e coloro che hanno partecipato a distanza! Abbiamo fatto un’ottimo lavoro!

Alla fine dello sprint, 20 dei 27 capitoli sono stati tradotti, un capitolo non è stato ancora tradotto e per sei capitoli il lavoro di traduzione non è ancora terminato.

Google Summer of Code in collaboration with Aspiration and FLOSS Manuals is hosting a “Doc Sprint Camp” at Google’s Mountain View headquarters (California) Dec 3 - 7, 2012.

The 2012 Doc Camp will feature:

1) An unconference on free software documentation topics - facilitated by Aspiration

2) 2-5 Book Sprints to produce books on free softwares - facilitated by FLOSS Manuals

Building on the success of the 2011 GSoC Doc Camp we are proud to bring you the 2012 GSoC Doc Camp. Like the previous event the 2012 GSoC Doc Camp is a place for free software communities to meet, create a book for their project, attract new people to their efforts, and share their documentation experiences. The camp aims to improve free documentation materials and skills in free software projects and individuals and help form the identity of the emergent free documentation sector.

FM News 2012-08

1. FM used to design a challenge for P2PU.
2. News from the global communities.
3. FM tips.
4. Digital Manual Scoping Study involving FLOSS Manuals.
5. Editors note.
6. Spotlight - VLC.

FM used to design a challenge for P2PU

Mick Fuzz has spent some time over  the last 2 months reworking material from FLOSS Manuals into a workbook to be used in a P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) challenge. P2PU is a website devoted to open education (https://p2pu.org/). A P2PU challenge consists of a series of learning steps and participant needs to carry out. After completion of the challenge, participants receive a badge specific to the challenge they have undertaken.

At the Video 4 Change gathering one of the things I was thinking about was  trying to understand of how emerging networks could best use Book Type to manage their strategy & training resources. Book Type is the software we use for the FLOSS Manuals community.

Skip to the end for some recommendations but I feel like it’s a bit early for concrete requests. I think more clearly presenting what we currently can offer to educators is the low hanging fruit rather than moving on to other needs and features.

This post borrows heavily (mostly verbatim) from the posts of Cheekay & Becky – apart from the sections on sharing and tools at the end. I was representing FLOSS Manuals at the retreat. I’ve taken my thoughts about how FM can interact with communities of educators and put them into a separate Blog post here.

In the early half of June, I participated in the video4change (V4C) workshop organized by WITNESS and EngageMedia. We were 21 participants from 12 or organizations working worldwide to train and support people using video for social change.

As previously reported, FLOSS Manuals was chosen to participate in a scoping study on the ‘Digital Manual’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). During the course of the scoping study which lasted two months, the researchers interviewed various members of their four case study groups, and this month the researchers and representatives from the case study groups gathered to hear the initial findings and discuss the plan for moving forward.