Subscribe to RSS
Cat on 
Posts Tagged ‘book’
OLPC Book Ready for G1G1!
Tomorrow, Monday, November 17 is the launch of the new Give One Get One campaign for 2008 - meaning, once again you can buy your very own XO laptop. The tagline for this year is Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the World.
You can buy yours at amazon.com/xo.
All our community author’s work has culminated into a book that’s now for sale on Lulu, and as soon as we can get it listed on Amazon, the book will be available there as well.
The back cover of all FLOSS Manuals books say “Please copy!” We fully intend for the OLPC Laptop Guide to available to anyone who wants one. You can purchase a printed copy at Lulu for a modest markup (that funds future booksprints and the like), or download the PDF, or remix the content at FLOSSManuals.net.
The neat thing is, once you’re done with a real book, you can pass it on to the next person who wants to learn about their XO. My hope is that XO users around the world will get a book and pass it on.
Shows front and back covers of the Laptop Guide for OLPC
FLOSS Manuals book store now open!
I went out for a run this morning and realized it has been a year this very week since I started my volunteer work with OLPC. This project was my first foray into the open source world from a contributor standpoint, and I can’t believe how it has paid back at least tenfold in the people I’ve met, the lessons I’ve learned, and the technology I’m now acquainted with.
What did it take? For me, time and faith and trust in others.
This is an amazing day and it has been an amazing journey. And what is significant about today? We now have a FLOSS Manuals bookstore and we now have a real, hold-it-in-your-hands, put-it-on-your-bookshelf, book. With a cover designed by someone who works at MOMA no less. (Wow!) With content carefully authored by people who learned and knew enough about the technology while also considering who would read the chapters and what they want to do with the technology.
I’m happily and proudly displaying the distributable FLOSS Manuals bookstore on my blog - see the sidebar on the left? That’s a bit of HTML code that anyone can display and host a portable virtual book store on any web site. Here’s the code.
<style>
@import url("http://en.flossmanuals.net/bookstore/bookstore.css");
</style>
<img src="http://en.flossmanuals.net/bookstore/bookstore.gif"
style="margin-bottom:5px;">
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://stores.lulu.com/feed.php?fStore=flossmanuals&fFormat=js"></script>
You can always download the PDF for free, but by buying a book you support the FLOSS Manuals project and help support the uptake and usefulness of free software by providing free documentation. Your money is well spent as these paperbacks are high quality and can take wear and tear. My hope is that people will read it and that the book will be passed on to the next learner.
Wikipatterns, the wiki, the book, teh awesome
I’ve gotten a review copy of WikiPatterns (the book) in the mail and I want to review it here and make sure everyone who reads my blog knows about this book and the WikiPatterns website. It’s a guide to getting the most out of your wiki and the most from collaboration with the people you work with via a wiki. Combined they offer such a great resource.
I admit, I read the Questions and Answers first, even though it’s near the end of the book. I guess I wanted to see how Stewart would answer the questions I hear from others. I enjoyed his answers and comparing them to how I’d answer. I think I’m in agreement with him 100%.
Next I went through choice Case Studies, starting with Leap Frog. There are loads of case studies and they involve internal and external wikis. One thing I noticed while reading the case studies is that the case studies refer to the patterns and anti-patterns by name, so you must refer to the wikipatterns.com website to study up on ‘em to get the most out of the book. You should refer to it regardless of your use of this book, it’s just that good.
Lots of fascinating tidbits in the case studies, though. I didn’t know that Leap Frog was an Agile development environment. Their internal wiki is named “Emma” which is cute to me, and apparently was better than naming it a wiki project. Good pointer.
Next I read about the author. Turns out, Stewart Mader and I both have Chemistry degrees.
Which led me to the foreward. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, wrote an excellent foreward that will inspire you to become an activist, wiki-based or otherwise. And he reminds us that we humans crave collaboration.
Then, I boggled at an entire chapter dedicated to proving that Wikipedia’s perceived “problems” will not transfer directly to your wiki implementation. Thank you! Thank you! I’m not alone in trying to go against the anti-Wikipedia sentiment applied to other wikis especially for technical documentation such as end-user manuals.
Next, I moved on to the examples of wikis in use. Wow, wiki as peer directory. This is an excellent use that I wouldn’t have thought of until it was spelled out for me in this book. Collaboration works best when you know the person. And knowing the person in a global company often means only finding out about them through their profile page. At BMC, we used editable Sharepoint pages to upload pictures for remote stateside team members and writers based in India, which helped us get to know each other better on a personal level. It makes it all the easier to ask about the weather or a certain family vacation before diving headlong into some technical topic or project hurdle with a team mate.
Also, wiki as meeting agenda opener-upper. I loved adding agenda items to a Sharepoint site when I thought of them, rather than trying to remember them and send them in an email to the right person before a meeting started. That’s exactly what goes on a wiki. Things that you don’t want to trap inside of an email, nor do you have to wait until an email is sent out requesting agenda items.
So there you have it - my review of an excellent book that is a carry-around edition of the wiki with the same name. While it works well with the wiki, it offers more than the wiki alone contains.
Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?
Wiki as the new FAQ
I discovered and have been meaning to write about Wiki is the new FAQ, an excellent blog post talking about SAP’s use of a wiki featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal. I especially like the play on words in the title. Reminds me of “brown is the new black” or “pink is the new blog,” hee hee.
A wiki can be a Frequently Asked Questions repository, much like the knowledge bases in their heyday in the late 80s. My favorite line from the blog entry has to be its closer: “It’s about a different way of thinking around how to interact with the community.” And that is what I have explored with my wiki presentation, about how to build community with a wiki and be an active member of that community. But what are other uses of the wiki?
Wiki as the next-generation customer forum
For many information seekers, wikis are better than forums because they are more easily searched and once you get a hit, the articles are meant to be scannable. Compare and contrast this to a long thread on a support forum where the answer to your question might be buried in the middle of a discussion about the mysterious beep in someone’s house. In my beep example, there are literally 78 pages of forum discussion, and if you read through the threads, you discover that a group of people took it upon themselves to go to the person’s house to find the beep. It has probably two years of forum discussion around the possibilities. Quite a fun and entertaining read, though, but not that efficient. Still, consider the community that built up around beep troubleshooting. Great stuff there.
But consider that your software users might not have the time to read through even a few pages of a forum discussion about a solution to their problem. That is where a wiki could be more useful than a forum. While forums are a fun online community for many, wikis might be the new generation of forum and many wiki engines offer comments on each article which are the next evolution of a forum - you can discuss the article itself. Another blogger, Leigh Blackall of Learn Online, discovered “The gold in a wiki is often in the discussion pages.”
Wiki as an easy HTML editor
Wikis originated as the quickest way to create a website without having to know HTML code. Really, wikitext is all about quickly doing headings, paragraphs, and lists.
Unfortunately each wiki has different rules for how to indicate a heading or list item or type of list. For some, it might be easier to just learn HTML code. And in the case of the Drupal CMS, there’s the ability to either use a rich-text editor or hand-code the HTML. It’s easy to troubleshoot when you can just view the HTML code, but what’s odd is that sometimes the resulting <div> tags generated out of your webform entries in Drupal seem to overlap.
But most wiki engines offer the fastest and easiest way to make a web page with a URL that you can consistently refer to.
Wiki as the new book
Some folks are pre-populating their wikis with book content, which is always an interesting test of what parts of a book are considered essential for “bookness” or “wikiness” - do you keep a table of contents? Is there any index? What page metaphors do you subscribe to in the wiki? These questions can be answered by looking for examples and analyzing their success. I especially like using wikis for the wiki aspects that go above and beyond books. For example, I’ve been exploring the Meatball Wiki site (Thanks Janet!) - and they have an excellent page with all sorts of Indexing Schemes categorized, such as Readership and Authorship which are fascinating for use in wikis as opposed to books. The Ontology category seems the most book-like to me, and I really like how that page offers ideas for all the possibilities that wiki offers.
Wiki as the new website
Does any company use only a wiki as its public-facing website?
Wiki as the new Content Management System
Eventually, the wiki can be the source files for important content, and I would guess there are people moving towards this wiki-as-cms system already. With my work with the OLPC project, I am learning more about wikis as source files, and found that the compare is actually quite powerful visually. Take a look at two versions of the demo or release notes from a release done in September. There is color coding and side-by-side comparison of text that is easily scanned for what changed, was added, or deleted. I’m learning so much about wikis for localization and translation efforts as well with the OLPC project. For example, this past week, I added links to translated content, such as the Spanish translation of the Simplified User Guide. The wiki engine itself (in this case, WikiMedia), lets me list the additional language pages in a blue bar on the original page, and then each language page automatically links back to the main language page (in this case, the English page.) Automatic is nearly always useful.
Do you see wikis being the next generation of other documentation outlets? Do tell.
