I finally feel some energy returning after my eye injury about a month ago, although my right eye remains dilated which still means that side is a bit out-of-focus and I don’t like driving at night. I feel like I need to give a status update or some such. So here goes.

Winter Camp

With luck my eye should be just fine in time for a big event coming up: Winter Camp 09 the first week of March. I’ll be representing and working for FLOSS Manuals at this event, held in Amsterdam. From the description, it will be an amazing week:

Network Cultures Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done. It will be a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks (each of which has 5-15 people) can work on their specific current topics.

The format was inspired by a cardboard box art installation that activates a temporary warehouse of contemporary knowledge from what I can gather from a translation of the page, Re-fitting ideas. Come on, that’s incredible. I am so thrilled to be a part of it. And I know it’s going to be a week of hard work.

Preschool website completed, using Wordpress 2.7

We’ve also finished the preschool website I mentioned in my interview with Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting. We used WordPress hosted at Midas Networks. I recorded some screencasts with Jing to show other parent volunteers how to edit content and work with images. All the photos on the site were taken by parents so it’s quite the “do-it-yourself” website. I am hoping that Wordpress 2.7 will be easy enough for even those in our volunteer and staff group who are not technically savvy but still give us the growth towards more content creators that we have in our goals for the site.

FLOSS Manuals and OLPC

We’ve sold over 200 copies of the OLPC Laptop Users Guide on Lulu.com, and Adam Hyde gave a copy of one of FLOSS Manuals’ books to Bob Young, the CEO of Lulu, while they were at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. Impressive. I still plan to make the Sugar Users Guide better. Adam Hyde and I are working on a book about how to run a Book Sprint in FLOSS Manuals, naturally, and we would welcome additional contributors.

DITA and Web 2.0

I’ve been approached to help put a public face on standards for DITA and Web 2.0 projects such as DITA for wikis (an example is Lisa Dyer’s DITA2Wiki project on SourceForge) and DITA for blogs (another example is DITA to Wordpress or DITA and microformats).

STC Intercom Editorial Advisory Panel

I’ve been pretty impressed with the STC Intercom issues in 2009 so far, but I wrote one of the articles so perhaps my judgement would be playing favorites. I would like to gather feedback from STC members and non-members who read the articles – how’s the content grabbing you this year?

Author-it 5.2

It looks as though 5.2 is the version of Author-it that will allow us to upgrade from 4.5. Our content just wouldn’t publish adequately (Word or HTML) on 5.0 or 5.1, but now that 5.2 is released, fingers crossed, we’ll be moving to 5.2 soon. I should write a blog post about some of our testing on our 20,000+ object database. I’m getting used to the Ribbon Bar as I continue to work in Word 2007, and Author-it’s 5.x interface feels a lot like Word 2007.

Writing a book, do tell me what you want to know

Last but certainly not least, I’m working with a professional editor to try to finalize my book about documentation as conversation that examines the power of social media for writing projects. It walks through the myriad of possibilities of different types of social media tools and analyzes how writers and communities are using these tools for technical documentation. Look for it this spring!

Let the remixing begin. I just got word today that the Infoslicer project has been checked into the Sugar code repository at http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/infoslicer, and released under the GPLv2 license. Can I get a whoohoo? Oh yeah!

Infoslicer is a Sugar Activity that enables students and instructors around the world to assemble Wikipedia articles into new information packages. Under the covers one of the technologies that makes this possible is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). I first wrote about the InfoSlicer last fall, in Wikislicing project gets real – introducing InfoSlicer as a Sugar Activity with a picture of students using scissors to re-assemble Wikipedia articles.

If you want to download the Activity to your XO or another computer with Sugar installed (here’s how) to try it out yourself, go to http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer and install the Activity (here’s how).

I have downloaded it to my XO in anticipation of showing it off at the next XO Austin Users Group meeting and the install was straightforward. I’ll get it on a USB stick to share at the meeting (2/16 at Central Market on N. Lamar in Austin at 6:30). Here’s a screenshot – and be sure to check out the YouTube video!

Laura Cowen notes that the xo package that you download doesn’t contain any sample articles from Wikipedia (which ideally it would to help you get up and running more quickly using the tutorial). You can use InfoSlicer without these sample articles (you download Wikipedia articles from within InfoSlicer anyway). If anyone is able to re-compile the xo package with sample articles in it, Laura can provide instructions on where to put the sample articles in the package so that InfoSlicer automatically picks them up when it starts. Who wants to create the wikislice seen ’round the world?

Lifted in whole from the December 1, 2008 OLPC Community update – what a neat story.

Cambridge: Samuel Dalembert, the 6-11 starting center for the NBA’s
Philadelphia 76ers, is a devotee of technology whose personal foundation
supports a variety of youth projects. Samuel attended the OLPC country
meetings in May. Recently, he was watching an episode of “House” on
television when he saw a G1G1 spot. Samuel immediately volunteered to do
a commercial for us, too. He will also make sure that XOs are deployed
to support his projects in his native Haiti, the Dominican Republic and
elsewhere, and will encourage other NBA players to get behind OLPC.

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

Here’s a post I wrote about the BookSprint published on OLPC News, an independent site that boasts about 5,000 readers a day.

OLPC / Sugar – Book Sprint, part II: Action

To build a set of books in five days takes a lot of preparation work that Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals, described in a prior post. Christoph also encouraged me to talk about what it was like to participate as a writer in the Book Sprint. Over all, it was very similar to a footrace of the same name, hosting a group of writers in a room cranking out as much usable content as possible! Read more…

Scissor-style information slicing

A photo of old school remixing – printing out Wikipedia articles and recombining them.

This was a fun learning exercise as part of an IBM Extreme Blue student project creating a Sugar Activity called InfoSlicer.

Instead of using scissors, you can now slice information by downloading Wikipedia articles, editing and remixing them, and reading them online. also uploading edits to Wikipedia (Edited: woops, that was part of our use case and it should work in the future because it was designed with that extension in mind).

Under the covers it is using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, also known as DITA (dih-tuh), a standard set of DTDs (or schemas) that allow sharing of open source transformations and an open toolkit implementation. See dita-ot.sourceforge.net for more information.

Watch a demo of the InfoSlicer Activity in action here:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0UDRi37MWM

This Activity was part of the Wikislice Project. We met our goal of creating custom curriculum materials from Wikipedia for OLPC but we still have work we want to do to help teachers use it.

I can hear all the librarians and teachers of the world saying together – cool!

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.

What is a continuation of a BookSprint called? I’m not sure what to call it, nor do I know which metaphors might fit, but there has been some additional energy emanating from the Austin-based OLPC BookSprint. In the week following the FLOSS Manuals BookSprint, OLPC has energized interns and staff members to continue refining existing chapters and adding new chapters also. As maintainer of the doc, I’ve been watching the changes on notifications and will make my own minor edits, but for the most part I’m just watching in delight at the outpouring of content. Another win for us writers is that the manuals will be remixed, output as HTML, and included on the XO laptop itself for deployments. My sincere hope is that good documentation will prove helpful to the support gang who work so hard on

I’m also completely tickled by the emails of encouragement and thanks coming from all parts of the community. Here are some excerpts from an email from David Farning, an awesome Sugar Labs community guy who I know I can learn a lot more from:

I realized this was not just a couple of programmers trying to throw
together a wiki as I watched Janet Swisher intensely studying the XO’s
battery.  Turns out she trying to determine if the installing the
battery section could be misread.  From my experience, a programmer
would have said, “If they can’t figure out how to put the battery in,
what’s the point of a fine manual.”

David Cramer, a tech writer at Motive, the company that hosted the
event, provided a excellent takeaway on tech writing.  ’When I write, I
write for one person.  Usually, one person reads what I write. The rest
of the department just asks him….’  Very on point for SL (Sugar Labs) and OLPC.
With our limited resources, we can’t afford to target a broad audience.
But, can afford to target ‘that one guy’ who can spread our message.

Technical Communication bloggers have also caught on to the uniqueness and excitement of this community documentation site, FLOSS Manuals. Tom Johnson, Heidi Hanson, and Charles Jeter talk about it around the 7:30 mark of this podcast:

http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/05/podcast-whats-new-in-the-field-of-technical-communication/

Quotes from the audio -
about the site “I’ve never seen anything quite like it…”
about the BookSprint “an amazing collaborative community type of event…”
about the FLOSS Manuals community “the social organization of it is going to give it it’s best foot forward…”

Adam Hyde has done an excellent round up of blog entries that talk about FLOSS Manuals. He took a picture of these covers of the books. They look so good and it’s so satisfying to see a book deliverable so quickly.

Additional excitement for this week centers around translation of the content. FLOSS Manuals has a side-by-side translation interface and all of the wiki interface is also in the language of the translators choice. See fa.flossmanuals.net to see the Farsi FLOSS Manuals.

Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals wrote up these instructions for how to get involved with the BookSprint going on this week. I’m hoping to write blog entries that describe the planning sessions and surrounding practical advice for this type of writing sprint, but I wanted to let my readers know the basic overview of how to participate this very week. Thanks Adam Hyde! Adam’s presenting at DocTrain East this fall, if you’d like to know more about FLOSS Manuals and the remixing the system enables.

XO BookSprint

This week in Austin, Texas a team of writers are gathering together to immerse themselves in a one week intensive documentation jam.

The purpose of the Book Sprint is to produce documentation in 1 week to support the forthcoming 2008 roll-out off the OLPC G1G1. The team in Austin consists of members of FLOSS Manuals (Adam Hyde, Anne Gentle), OLPC (Adam Holt), Sugar (David Farning, Walter Bender), and the Austin XO Users Group, and YOU! We have set up the online tools so you too can contribute! To make a contribution please do the following :

1. Register
To contribute to the documentation you can register at FLOSS Manuals :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/register

2. Contribute!
There are several manuals planned to be finished by the end of the week
(August 29) including a Sugar manual, an XO manual, and 5 Sugar
Activities manuals.  You can see the structure of the manuals here:
Sugar :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar

XO (OLPC Hardware) :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/XO

Sugar Activities :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Browse
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Chat
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Record
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Terminal
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Write

To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter
to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button!
Its as simple as that.

Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding
images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more
chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you
just need to know how to write.

If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then join the
chat room listed above and ask us! We look forward to your contribution!

For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also wish to read
our manual :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals

3. Chat
Its a good idea to talk with us so we can help co-ordinate all
contributions. We have a chat room for this using Internet Relay Chat
(IRC). If you know how to use IRC you can connect to the following :
server : irc.freenode.net
channel : #olpc-content

If you do not know how to use IRC then visit the following web based
chat software in your browser :
http://irc.flossmanuals.net/

Information on how to use this web based chat software is here :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/IRC

I have seen the eminent reinvention of technical documentation as we know it, which inspired me to begin chronicling my own observations and shifts in the field of communicating technical topics through conversation.

One such revealing moment happened while I was working on documentation for the One Laptop Per Child project on their wiki at wiki.laptop.org. The Give One Get One rollout  was hurtling towards the organization, and they had not completely designed a support system nor did they have a user manual ready to view online or to print. The Give One Get One program gave the opportunity for the first time for anyone in the U.S to buy a laptop and know that one additional laptop would be sent to another country. Through the nearly heroic efforts of one person building a new team self-named the Support Gang, an all-volunteer crew if I understood the situation correctly, a wiki-based Support FAQ came to life and a support email address was created and a support team made of volunteers was staffed.

The amazing revelation to me was that the wiki FAQ could and did answer so many questions because they came from real people, customers of the Give One Get One program. The questions were real questions from real users, so there wasn’t a delay in seeking out a subject matter expert. These were conversations happening on the wiki Edit tab or on the Discuss tab. See the History on wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ for examples of the questions and answers that happened, and also notice the time stamps for some of the answers. The immediacy of the response is practically like an Instant Messaging conversation via the wiki FAQ page.

How did the community completely fill out these highly useful wiki pages? Or did just a few volunteers do it? It was the work of a few good people continuing conversations with real users or potential and upcoming customers of the little laptop. Community-supported email, forums, and IRC discussions rolled into these wiki pages. Supporting users was the work of college students, of parents who were anticipating their laptop’s arrival, and other non-professional writers. One such volunteer was Katie, a mom who is a mathematician by day, and an excellent FAQ writer by night. Her wiki pages and research around the wireless connectivity were extremely helpful to everyone who bought a Give 1 Get 1 laptop. Without her dedication, many of us couldn’t have connected to the Internet, and the user manual I continued to work on benefited greatly from her wiki contributions and knowledge sharing.

That the community created such helpful, useful, readable pages was a complete turnaround for my attitude about what sweat goes into writing and rewriting carefully crafted topics to then submit for review and sweat over again and again until a deadline comes. I thought, instead of toiling over the exact words and following a style guide, should I try to recruit and entice and motivate contributors from every professional or amateur background possible? Some paranoid types say that laymen and amateur writers could beat us at our own chosen profession. But “beat” is not the right term. It’s not a contest or an all-out competition, it’s a group effort towards a shared goal.

Armed with this revelation, I began studying how conversations and community attract the right combination of content and information to offer the right amount of technical communication delivered in the right manner. Part of my study involved hands-on creation of end-user documentation, including a PDF manual, using the  OLPC community’s wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide, and also using a highly customized wiki engine at FLOSS Manuals, www.flossmanuals.net.

Much of the labor and toil on those wiki pages and especially with the community volunteer atmosphere of OLPC and FLOSS Manuals is coming to fruition next week at the FLOSS Manuals BookSprint to document the XO laptop and the Sugar operating system for the students, parents, and teachers benefiting from the One Laptop Per Child project around the world.