Wow, we did it! A book in two days thanks to a great group of writers, an excellent Subject Matter Expert, and remote contributors from Calgary to Moscow to Bangalore. This sprint was our first serious attempt to include remote contributors from anywhere. We had about 14 remote writers with at least 5-7 in the room in Palm Springs, and up to 25 writers online at a time. The PDF (link) is 160 pages long and looks downright snazzy. A printed copy is available on Lulu.
The manual is available online at http://en.flossmanuals.net/firefox.
What is a Book Sprint?
Book Sprints are an innovative format based on Code Sprints but with the focus on producing documentation instead of code. Ideally a week-long event, a Book Sprint starts with an outline for a newly formed book idea, and ends on the last day with the production of a printed book available to participants and interested readers using an on demand print service. Writing a book in a week or less is an incredible and demanding feat. It was enabled by the FLOSS Manuals platform which has turned the corner from wiki to collaborative publishing platform. The platform enables fluent collaboration with local and remote writers, a low technical threshold and an automated print source generator that produces beautiful book-formatted PDF files. Upload this file to a print-on-demand service, and you have a fast moving process able to produce books at the same rate programmers change the software.