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FLOSS Manuals sprints to build quality free documentation

December 23, 2008 (2:00:00 PM)  -  2 years, 8 months ago

By: Scott Nesbitt

Documentation is one area in which free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) is weakest. A project called FLOSS Manuals is trying to remedy this situation. The idea behind the project is to create quality, free documentation for free software.FLOSS Manuals is the brainchild of digital artist Adam Hyde. Hyde doesn’t have what some would consider to be the typical background of a FLOSS contributor. In his various lives, Hyde ran independent radio stations in New Zealand and managed Internet service providers in Australia and the Netherlands.However, the genesis of FLOSS Manuals follows the classic pattern of an open source project: scratching a particular itch. To earn a living, Hyde ran workshops on free and open source software, and started developing documentation for the workshop participants. He realized that “the state of documentation for free software was pretty appalling. So, I went from documenting my workshops to putting those documents on the Internet to adding more and more to it.” From there, he put the documentation on a wiki to better manage it.

No #!@&! Documentation?…More OSS Tutorials Than You Can Shake a Stick At

by Sam Dean - Dec. 23, 2008

(Original post here)

Linux.com has an interesting item up today on FLOSS Manuals, an effort to produce comprehensive, free documentation for popular open source software titles. As the post notes, “documentation is one area in which free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) is weakest.” That’s true, and FLOSS Manuals looks like an excellent learning and reference resource for titles such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Blender, Inkscape and more. Here are some of the details on what’s available there, and 16 other open source learning and tutorial resources that we’ve compiled.

Original here.

FLOSSmanuals.net: A New Wiki Help Authoring/Publishing Tool Hybrid

September 5th, 2008

Flossmanuals.net is a new wiki help authoring/publishing tool hybrid that, as far as I know, is completely unique. The site is more than a wiki. It allows groups of authors to create specific chapters independently. You can then remix the chapters into any arrangement and selection you want through a drag-and-drop interface. Finally, you can export the selection as a PDF file. Alternatively, you can embed the manual on a separate site using an API.

There is a new front page for FLOSS Manuals English. The design replaces an older php based approach which had become outdated.

If you want to help check that manuals have been migrated correctly you can report bugs at the following address.

https://gitlab.com/mickfuzz/fm_en_splash/issues

I wanted to write a quick post outlining the process of a ‘course sprint’ to share with some of the communities that I’m involved with including the P2PU, School of Open and the FLOSS Manuals community. I think this methodology can be of use to emerging groups of on-line educators creating open education resources (OERs) about Free Culture and Free Software.

The  course, ’Look at Open Video’, was created for the School of Open as part of a ‘course sprint’ which tool place at the Supermarkt as part of the  Open Video Forum December 2012 in Berlin. The forum aimed to bring together participants interested in open video in the context of a euro-african culture and technology project called Mokolo. The event was supported by xm:lab. For ongoing information on the project see – ovf.xmlab.org.

and when I say didnt exist, I mean…no title, text, images, covers were started until Tuesday….

GSoC Doc Camp Books – Evergreen, Fontforge, Etoys as paper and electronic books (kindle, android, iPad).

On Monday Dec 3 we started the second GSoC Doc camp – bringing together 3 free software projects to hold a 2 day unconference and 3 day Book Sprint.

It was a tremendously successful event, helping to reshape how each  group understood their documentation and the role it plays in supporting and promoting free software. We settled down to the Book Sprint on day 2 (Tuesday Dec 4) with table of content generation first on the agenda. Each group worked out the ToC by the end of lunch and then immediately into writing.

Sourcefabric who are working to take over from Flossmanuals on the development of Booki have put out the following video.

“Sourcefabric builds open source software to support independent media worldwide. On February 14th, we’ll announce our tool to help people and organisations write and publish great multi-platform books.

Write and publish great books ready for iPad, Kindle, Nook or print within minutes. Write, translate or reuse content by yourself or with others and let the platform take care of structure, formatting, licensing, versions and export to book formatted pdf, epub, odt or html.