This week FLOSS Manuals participates to the Co-position research meeting in Brussels, with the other partners of the Libre Graphics Research Unit (LGRU).

The Libre Graphics Research Unit is a traveling lab where new ideas for creative tools are developed. Its diverse activities range from the practical to the theoretical via writing, research meetings, experimental prototyping, conferences and workshops.

LGRU is lead by four European Media Labs:  Constant, Medialab Prado, Piksel, WORM, and FLOSS Manuals is one of the associate partners of the Unit.

Not too long ago, we told you about our exciting new partnership with Czech-based organization Sourcefabric, which is at the cutting edge of media and technology. We are now pleased to announce the fruits of our collective labour: Booktype. The new and improved, free and open source, online collaborative publishing platform.

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This platform enables any one or (group of someones!) to produce beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any e-reader within minutes. With this powerful tool, users have the tools in their hands to bring their creative visions and useful information into bookform and work to engage audiences build communities around their content. We are continuing to work together to build the capabilities and reach of this platform, and we will be sure to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in this exciting new phase of free and open source collaborative self-publishing. Stay tuned.

The open source not-for-profit organisations FLOSS Manuals Foundation and Sourcefabric are pleased to announce their newly forged partnership to maintain and develop the code base behind FLOSS Manuals’ successful free software documentation platform.

Said Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals: “We’ve been actively looking for partners to help achieve our mission. As FM goes from strength to strength, we’re happy to partner with an organisation that has the track record of Sourcefabric in order to allow our platform to grow even further.”

The FLOSS Manuals platform is mentioned (along with our partners at Sourcefabric!) in the article “2012: The Year Of New Ebook Tools” on Forbes.com. The writer profiles many proprietary and some FLOSS options for creating e-books. Check it out!

FLOSS Manuals Francophone is proud to present the first book in French about OpenStreetMap, available (of course!) under a free license (Creative Commons BY-SA).

This books hopes to increase the reach of OpenStreetMap in French speaking countries, thanks to a clear and well structured documentation, that tackles:
What is collaborative cartography and why should I contribute? How can I contribute, collecting data in the field with or without a GPS, with Potlatch 2 et JOSM? How can I use the OpenStreetMap data: share maps, download data on my GPS device…

The Finnish version of the Scribus manual has been completed and is now available at: http://fi.flossmanuals.net/scribus/.

All in all, fi.flossmanuals.net now represents approximately 2,000 PDF pages of open source documentation.

It is 26th most popular Finnish computer/internet site on Oindex.

The next item on the workplan for the Finnish FM is the translation the OpenStreetMap manual.

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On January 18th, the FLOSS Manuals Foundation joins websites across the world in protesting the dangerous censorship legislation currently pending in the US Congress.

Read more and take action on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

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Greetings from all of us at the FMF,

we have a lot of exciting events and announcements coming in the next few months. With your support, we plan to continue to support our existing language communities, promoting the Book Sprint methodology, and work with new collaborators to start FLOSS Manuals groups in more areas and in more languages.

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The (unofficial?) FLOSS Manuals Foundation dance at the first FMF meet-up, Berlin, October 2011

A new manual has been published by the Finnish FLOSS Manuals, on the free and open source office suite LibreOffice.

You may now read the manual online (currently only available in Finnish).

LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software hosted by The Document Foundation, a not-for-profit organization.

LibreOffice was started as a fork of OpenOffice, by many of the original developers of OpenOffice, when the latter was bought by Oracle Corporation.

Original post by Nico Gnecchi published on the Freedom Fone Web site.

Over the last week a team of dedicated individuals from across the globe gathered to partake in our epic Freedom Fone BookSprint 2011. We are proud to announce the result of our efforts - our new book: Freedom Fone. If you’d like a hard copy, order online from Lulu.com.

How was this done? Well, lets just say it was a miracle.