News

Book Store FLOSS Manuals is experimenting with our embeddable Book Store. We have a very basic embed tag. The tag looks something like this : style @import url("http://adam.engagetv.com/bookstore.css"); /style img src "http://adam.engagetv.com/bookstore.gif" script type "text/javascript" src "http://stores.lulu.com/feed.php?fStore flossmanuals fFormat js" /script and the ...

More Posts about FLOSS Manuals In the geekosphere ...LWN.net with a rather interesting write up : "FLOSS manuals clearly fill a niche that is needed in the free software world. The manuals have a rather professional look that will immediately stand out to users. There is a lot of work to be done, but it would appear that the project has made an excellent start. As one might guess, it is always looking ...

FLOSS Manuals Wins Our First Award FLOSS Manuals won the communities award at the New Zealand Open Source Awards on Sept 24th in a ceremony in Wellington, New Zealand. http://www.nzosa.org.nz/2008 winners Ali Kohari was present to pick up the award in behalf of FLOSS Manuals and make a short speech. It is amazing to be recognised for the contribution to Open Source. We are still a young project and ...

They're Using Our Manuals Here Another one from the 'they're using our manuals here' file...this one spotted at a Croatian IBM Conference. If anyone knows the identity of this unknown Croatian businessman, please let us know...

New FLOSS Manuals Board We are very happy to announce that a new Board is in place. The Governance Board consists of : Rene Post Chair Eric Kluitenberg Secretary Sacha van Geffen Treasurer From left to right Sacha, Rene, and Eric at FM HQ The board is a very experienced and inspirational group with a fantastic background in Foundations, free software, cultural management, and green energy ...

Columbia Software Freedom Day from the "they're using our manuals here" section ... http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/2872881086/

Sugar / OLPC Books Arrive! The print on demand books have arrived for Sugar and OLPC. They look fantastic. The books look great! The layout looks delicious and the cover art and writing etc all work together wonderfully. A pretty amazing thing to hold after a 1 week Book Sprint and then outputing straight from FLOSS Manuals to print on demand print ready copy. Zero FM Book in 1 week.Collaboratively ...

Another Blog Mention "FLOSS Manuals is a new wiki help authoring/publishing tool hybrid that, as far as I know, is completely unique." I'd Rather be Writing Technical Writers Blog : http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/05/flossmanualsnet a new wiki help authoringpublishing tool hybrid/ From NYC designer Michael Angeles : "What Floss offers that is different is the ability to remix books ...

Podcast About FLOSS Manuals Anne Gentle forwarded this information about a podcast published this week : http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/09/05/podcast whats new in the field of technical communication/ The start of their discussion of FLOSS Manuals is around the 7:30 mark. Quotes about the site "I've never seen anything quite like it..." about the BookSprint "an amazing collaborative ...

FLOSS Manuals in the News FM is starting to get some grit in the blogosphere. These appeared in the last week or so : Just Write Click Blog (Anne Gentles) post about the OLPC / Sugar Book Sprint : "We wrote seven manuals for One Laptop per Child in a week: one for Sugar, the operating system, one the XO, which is the hardware for all of the deployments for One Laptop per Child, and manuals for ...

FLOSS Manuals Finalist in Awards FLOSS manuals is on the short list for the New Zealand Open Source Awards (http://www.nzosa.org.nz/). The news came today from Chris Daish, the founder of the awards. We are excited to be nominated! The ceremony is in Wellington, New Zealand on Sept 24. Last year FLOSS Manuals contributor JUlian Oliver won an award at the same event for Open Source and Art.

XO / Sugar Sprint Complete We have 7 manuals complete. Still a little work and fact checking to be done on the XO Networking. The process is ongoing of course but there is a tremendous amount already done. Above is a image of the trial covers designed by Lotte Meijer (FLOSS Manuals Designer, MoMA http://www.lottemeijer.com). We output the print ready PDF using our print on demand tools and then ...

XO / Sugar Book Sprint Progress The Book Sprint in Austin Texas is in its 4th day and we have done a tremendous amount of work. 7 manuals are almost done and the team is writing so we can have all the content in by the end of the day. That leaves Friday for clean up and editing. Here is a screen shot from my Desktop with the 7 PDFs generated using our print on demand tools. It seems we have written ...

XO / Sugar Book Sprint Underway! Today (August 25) we began the XO / Sugar Book Sprint in Austin Texas. The sprint has been largely organised by Anne Gentle and Adam Hyde and is being hosted by local company Motive by invitation of David Cramer. The Book Sprint aims to create documentation to support the forthcoming 2008 G1G1 OLPC roll out. Gathered at the event are currently : Anne Gentle (Just ...

OLPC / Sugar Book Sprint We are currently raising money for the OLPC / Sugar Book Sprint to be held in Austin Texas, August 24 29. The Book Sprint will bring 6 9 writers together to write several manuals on OLPC and Sugar. FLOSS Manuals is the official documentation repository for both these projects and we are aiming to build a team in Texas that will complete a series of manuals in an intensive working ...

FM Translation Zone Beta We are testing a new FLOSS Manuals Translation Zone for the translation of manuals. It is a temporary holding zone as our preferred method for managing languages is to set up specific FM language communities rather than just translate. The translation zone enables side by side translation. We manage this through a plugin developed especially for FM called 'Xchange'. You can ...

Screencast Experiments I just created a screencast (a video recording of my screen with narration) for getting started editing manuals on FLOSS Manuals. It's my absolute first attempt at screencasting, so please forgive the amateur voiceover work. The file is stored for the next 60 days at screencast.com, and you can view it there (with Adobe's Flash player installed in your browser). Click here ...

Inkscape Book Sprint Done We completed the FLOSS Manuals / Inkscape Book Sprint. It was a tremendous success, with the team finishing 30 chapters in English and many (yet to be counted) chapters in French. In addition we pushed the FLOSS Manuals interface forward with a few new features including a status management system, and some new additions to the editor. If that isn't enough, Brianna Laugher ...

Inkscape BookSprint I am very happy to announce the FLOSS Manuals/Inkscape Booksprint. The project is in collaboration with Inkscape and sponsored by Google. The event is happening now in Paris at La Cité des Sciences in Paris from July 5 12. Participating on site are: Cédric Gémy French documentation writer involved with the Inkscape Docs team and also author of a wonderful book on Gimp, and ...

James Vasile James Vasile is from the Free Software Law Center (based in NYC http://www.softwarefreedom.org). He was in Amsterdam recently and we met and had a lovely dinner and discussed the GPL and its relevance to documentation. James happily affirmed it's a good license to use for docs. You can read his blog post about it here: http://hackervisions.org/?p 23

FM Farsi Underway! Hey folks, this is to inform you that "FLOSS Manuals NZ Trust" is now officially established and "FM Farsi" is Underway. In fact "FM Farsi" is the result of hard work and great enthusiasm of a team who devoted their time and energy to get things done perfectly and beautifully during the last 3 months. So far, more than 20 manuals have been translated and technically proved from English ...

Brighton Book Sprint June 10 13 FLOSS Manuals participated in a Book Sprint (Brighton, UK) with team members from Tactical Tech, Make Internet TV, Witness and IFI Watch. The sprint was lead by Andrew Lowenthal from Engage Media / Tactical Tech. FLOSS Manuals suggested the Book Sprint in request for assistance on a Tactical Tech project. It was a good opportunity to edit some of the video manuals in ...

FLOSS Manuals Workshop Helsinki, Finland Mick Fuzz and Adam Hyde were in Helsinki May 30 31 to lead a 2 day workshop on FLOSS Manuals and the Transmission (http://www.transmission.cc) network. The workshop focused on an introduction to Free Software, an explanation of the FLOSS Manuals platform and philosophy, and the current state of affairs within the Transmission video network. We covered a ...

What Motivates Free Documentation Writers? What motivates people to contribute to documentation projects for free? Is the documentation actually free as in no cost? I’ll speak from my own experience and draw from recent research in this area. Plus, I just read Chris Anderson’s excellent essay on free as a business model and learned about the multiple economies and values and currencies available ...

FLOSS Manuals Upgrade FLOSS Manuals has upgraded the platform. Upgrade features include: TWiki 4.2 (from 4.0) Internationalisation fixes Xinha (WYSIWYG Editor) 0.93 WYSIWYG works now in Safari WYSIWYG no longer inserts strange characters if using Firefox Localisation plugin upgrade (including right to left character support) Remix Plugin Upgrade Blacklist WikiSpam filter numerous ...

Pure Data Book Sprint So, Adam sent us (he was supposed to come too, but couldn't at the end) he sent Derek Holzer and myself to this Croatian island Korcula, into the little (but very very cute) town ­named the same (Korcula) so that we sprint it up and write a Pure Data manual for FLOSS Manuals. I took my little old red car and drove down from Ljubljana over Rijeka and under scary stoney Velebit ...

Discuss Pages We just added discussion pages in the FLOSS Manuals repository. This means each chapter now has a discussion page so anyone can comment on any chapter and suggest improvements, discuss issues, etc. This was very easy to implement using the lovely and very flexible TWiki engine upon which our platform is based.

REMIX Optimisation The REMIX script has been optimised to ensure faster loading. The old REMIX LIVE MANUAL embeds will still work but if you prefer quicker loading of the embedded manuals then remix the manuals and use the freshly generated embed tags. REMIX is designed to enable you to create your own manuals from existing manuals. REMIX also enables embedding of manuals in a webpage/blog/CMS. This ...

Google Sponsors Book Sprint Google is to sponsor the second FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint. The event will focus on bringing 4 free documentation writers together in Paris in July to write a manual on Inkscape, the popular vector graphics software. The team comes from France, The Netherlands and the USA to work together for a week at the Paris Cité des Sciences. The Book Sprint will also be open to remote ...

FLOSS Manuals to Attend TXAP Transmission.cc is a international network of independant video producers. Transmission.cc has organised a number of community events including a recent event in Amsterdam partly sponsored by FLOSS Manuals. As a result FLOSS Manuals has been invited to the Transmission Asia Pacific (TXAP) to be held in Indonesia in May of this year. Adam Hyde will attend the event and ...

Pure Data Book Sprint In the first week of April Luka Prinčič and Derek Holzer have been participating in the first FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint. The sprint took Derek and Luka away to the beautiful island of Korcula to write a manual on Pure Data. The idea stems from discussions with Tomas Krag from WNDW (http://wndw.net/) and is based on 'Code Sprints'. Code Sprints are gatherings organised by free ...

Wikis for Docs A couple of interesting articles on using wikis for documentation have appeared recently. Of interest is Anne Gentles post on her blog about er experiences with the OLPC project and transferring one of the manuals to FLOSS Manuals: http://justwriteclick.com/2007/12/31/xo doc and the journey to wiki fied documentation/#respond There was also a very interesitng post on Teleread in response ...

Wikipedia Starting to Pay Contributors Brianna Laugher had let me know of this a few months ago, but her experiments with paying illustrators for developing illustrations for Wikmedia Commons recently hit the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/technology/03wiki.html

Wikipedia Foundation Announcement (FDL) There has been a resolution from the Wikimedia Foundation which revolves around getting out of the troublesome FSF Free Documentation License : http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License update In essense the situation is: "As you've probably read, the Wikimedia Foundation has agreed in principle to support an update of Wikipedia content ...

Wireless Networking Book This is a very good book: Wireless Networking for the Developing World (http://dk.wndw.net/download.html). Its open and free, developed by some people at WSFII (http://www.wsfii.org/). I met Tomas Krag, one of the writers, at the Open Translation conference over the last days. The book is very inspiring as a model for the type of sophistication of content achievable ...

Localization Plugin Beta Aleksandar Erkalovic has been working on the translation and localization plugins and we have our first plugin in beta (testing) form. The first plugin enables the translation of interface texts. these interface elements are stored in TWiki using special variables. These variables can be extracted and stored in '.po' files which contain the original language and the translated ...

Why you should learn to love free documentation First draft of an article for publication: Free software has enjoyed many years of support from the cultural sector. Artists and activists have often been active in promoting free technologies. Artists also often make a living through teaching and workshops centered on free technologies they use in their practice. Curators of exhibitions, symposiums ...

Open Translation Event Aspiration Tech (http://aspirationtech.org/) are a ANGO based in San Francisco with the aim to 'connect non profit and civil society organisations'. Their work is mainly in the area of free software and they are the organisers (along with Mi2 http://ww.mi2.hr) of the Open Translation Tools (http://opentranslation.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Main Page ) event in Zagreb, Croatia ...

Wikimania 2007 Report I wanted to post a brief outline of my experience of Wikimania 2007 in Taiwan (August 3 5). I won't cover all the talks I went to or the flossmanuals centric discussions I had, just some of the highlights of the event itself. The event was very focused on all things Wikimedia (the umbrella foundation for wikipedia and its associated projects Wikimedia commons, Wikiversity, Wikibooks ...

New Search Added FLOSS Manuals has just added a new search feature to the site....but its not just any old search. It uses the new Custom Google Search system, which means we have customised our search to help you find manuals to help you on FLOSS Manuals, and if it is not there you can also search our selection of WWW documentation and WWW forums. Finding documentation online is getting harder, not ...

New Sys Admin Artist and technologist Mr Snow ( http://laudanum.net/mr.snow/ ), has joined FLOSS Manuals to help us all with admin duties and hacking away to improve bits and pieces. We are all very happy to have such an experienced and community minded person on board. Mr Snow has been contributing to manuals on OSX free softwares which are bubbling away in development, and now he also moving to fill ...

Gobuntu Docs? Gobuntu is another initiative from the Ubuntu Foundation. It is yet another distribution, this time with the same look and feel of the standard Ubuntu release but instead with a much stricter license policy. All content of the distribution will be 'free' as in libre. Mark Shuttleworth explains it in his blog: "It is a flavour of Ubuntu (like Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that is basically the same ...

Comments Added to Manuals FLOSS Manuals is experimenting with putting comments into the manuals so anyone can have their say over the usefulness, quality, scope and accuracy of any of the manuals. Or, indeed, to add extra information. You do not need to have a user account or be logged in to add comments. While all our manuals are published from the editing repository as static HTML the comments in ...

XS4ALL to Sponsor FLOSS Manuals Today we received the good news that XS4ALL, the well known Dutch Internet Provider intends to sponsor FLOSS Manuals. Although details are still to be finalised we hope the sponsorship agreement will cover the hosting of our server in the XS4ALL racks and bandwidth. This is good news for FLOSS Manuals, as bandwidth and hosting costs are one of the biggest overheads for ...

FLOSS Manuals Workshop at Wikimania! FLOSS Manuals has been invited to lead a "Free Manuals for Free Software!" workshop at Wikimania in Taiwan. Adam Hyde will lead the workshop, and focus first explaining the concept behind FLOSS Manuals, discuss what makes a good manual, and then lead the workshop through hands on steps on how to edit and contribute material to FLOSS Manuals. This is an excellent ...

The State of Free Documentation It's often hard to find good writing about the state of online documentation. Andy Oram writes for O'Reilly OnLamp, and he has contributed a couple of very interesting articles on the motivations of free documentation writers, and the state of free documentation. Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey was published in the first half of June and ...

New NvU Manual Ever wondered how you can make HTML using free software tools but you don't want to use a text editor? NvU is an Open Source Web editing application that allows WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing and creation of web pages. The NvU website is at: http://www.nvu.com The good folks at Your Machines (namely Simon Yuill), have ported their manual on NvU to FLOSS Manuals ...

New Mailing List There is a new mailing list for those interested in discussing the current and future movements of FLOSS Manuals. It is open for anyone to subscribe, we will kick off with a discussion about licensing and the editing process. http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss flossmanuals.net

Editing Changes After some contemplation chapters are now directly editable from the manuals themselves. Essentially the registration/editing process was too complex and now it has been simplified. It is now possible to edit a manual page, when you haven't previously registered, in two clicks: click on the 'edit' text at the top right of a manual if you are not logged in it will redirect you to ...

License Change FLOSS Manuals is changing the license of all material in the repository from the Free Documentation License to the GPL. Why? Well...the issue of licenses and documentation is a frustrating road to travel. There are many 'free licenses' in the world, but none of them work well as documentation licenses if you have the following prerequisites: compatability with the GPL ease of ...