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:
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.