Last night we all gathered in a movie theater setting and each network attending Winter Camp gave a five minute presentation about their network and each member introduced themselves, in English, even though only a handful of the 160 people here speak English as a first language.
I was both humbled and in awe of the activism and energy my fellow Winter Campers display. Many, it seemed, are artists in new media or curators. There are some developers here as well but the majority of attendees seem to be actively running conferences or in-person events themselves. There were few US-ers there, with many more Europeans represented. One other network organizer said she invited her US activists but they were busy with a potential union organization of reality TV script writers.
Not only is the artwork for Winter Camp cool, the vibrant participants are making this event really interesting. Rather than a t-shirt giveaway for the event, we all got European-sized pillow case shams. Great idea!
Andy Oram, an O’Reilly editor, has two blog entries already posted and I wanted to be sure to link to them to offer his perspective which has been extremely valuable. Today I learned that large publishers consider a book’s “buzz window” (my term, not the publisher’s) to be about three weeks only. In other words, you only get about three weeks to promote a book. He discusses “a network of networks” in his first post (be sure to click through to the video) and OLPC along with many other networks in his second.
Today we met from 9-6:30 with an hour break for lunch, and had great discussions about not only the writer’s experience with the FLOSS Manuals tool, but also what experience are we creating for readers? I gave a short presentation about Book Sprint planning and we discussed ideas for improving and building on the Book Sprint experience for at least an hour.
The upcoming Book Sprints are listed on the FLOSS Manuals blog, but I’ll also list them here:
PureData Book Sprint
We are trying to work out the dates now for a sprint in NYC. Hans-Christoph Steiner and Derek Holzer will be at the helm.
Possibly it will be in late March, in NYC.
FSF Book Sprint
The Free Software Foundation will host Book Sprint (Organised by Andy Oram and Adam Hyde ). It will be to work on a manual introducing newbies to the command line.
Boston, March 21,22
Doctrain Book Sprint
The Doctrain conference will host a Book Sprint in California. Janet Swisher and Adam Hyde will co-ordinate. The sprint will be about FireFox, and the Mozilla Foundation are sending Chris Hofmann (Director of Engineering at Mozilla) to participate.
Palm Springs, California. March 17-20.
Open Translation Book Sprint
A Book Sprint to write a manual about Open Translation tools. being organised by Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn (Gunner from Aspiration Tech).
Amsterdam, June 26-30.