News

Booki Code Sprint We are now in the middle of a Booki Code Sprint in Wellington, NZ. More from us soon!

Collaborative Futures Launch(es) Collaborative Futures will have two launches, one in Berlin on Saturday Feb 6 (1700) during the transmediale Festival http://www.transmediale.de and one in New York on March 4 at Eyebeam http://www.eyebeam.org/feeds/announcements/pre order collaborative futures now .

Collaborative Futures "Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act." Tom Clancy There is something exciting about holding a freshly printed book in your hands that you helped create. Today I went to the printers and looked at a test copy of the Collaborative Futures book we finsihed last week. It looks great! This book was written over 5 days (Jan 18 22, 2010) during a Book Sprint ...

Ardour Manual Done! The wonderful wonderful manual about Ardour is done! It was produced in a Book Sprint / Workshop held at moddr in Rotterdam and lead by Derek Holzer. Its a super good manual and designed to help the newbies get to grips with Ardour. The manual was largely written by participants of a workshop about Ardour. The writers knew very little about Ardour to begin with and then documented ...

FLOSS Manuals becomes 1000! Today FLOSS Manuals hit the 1000th registration on the English site! It doesn't seem possible, since we started the year with under 200 registrations...quite a rapid growth, and we are adding more and more contributors, manuals, and translations everyday to help with the distribution and use of free software. woohooo!

GSoC Sprint done! We finished the Google Summer of Code mentoring Guide in 2 days! Then I stole off to a print on demand service and got some copies printed for the participants of the sprint : I will give books out tonight, and Leslie from the Summer of Code program will distribute 250 photocopied guides. Its also available as an epub for digital readers.

Google Summer of Code Mentoring We are in the middle of a Book Sprint for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Leslie Hawthorn invited several people to work on a manual to introduce new mentors to GSoC. Its a short 3 days sprint and the manual will be ready for the GSoC mid term meeting which stats on Friday.

FM ePUB tested on Android Rob Myer kindly tested a beta FM epub on Android. Displayed below is the Introduction to the Command line book displayed on his phone : The first page of the manual : Another page :

FM ePUB Ok, so at FLOSS Manuals labs Douglas and Aco have been busy. We are currently extending our import and output possibilities. In the lab we can currently create ePUB from FLOSS Manuals sources on the fly. This means that we have content friendly for ereaders, iphone and other portable devices.Free manuals for free software...everywhere.... Its working now and will soon be available through ...

Mate.. While in Buenos Aires for the Wikimania conference I met with Yaco FM er and free content champion. Yaco gave me a cool Mate cup with FLOSS Manuals engraved on it! Mate is good for keeping awake so I think it will become our friend at Book Sprints :)

Archive.org Sponsors Development We are very happy to announce that Archive.org will part sponsor the development of Booki. Booki, for those that do not know, is the new book wiki platform being developed by FLOSS Manuals. We are still looking for co sponsors, but this initial sponsorship allows us to get our coding underway. . Archive.org are also very interested in working with us in the ...

Book Binding FLOSS Manuals now has its own Book Binder Cara Bell Jones. We will be making hand made books for Book Sprint participants so that at the end of the week we can give everyone that was on site a book. This means we can really truly go from 0 to book in 5 days! We will also hand bind books at select events that FLOSS Manuals is invited to. Below are some images of the beautiful books ...

Theora Sprint Done! The Book Sprint on Ogg Theora is done. We wrote 212 pages of material about how to play ogg, install, use, deploy, edit, encode, transcode, embed, resize, analyse etc etc etc It was a cool team, and a wonderful result. You can see it here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/theoracookbook and buy the current version here: http://www.lulu.com/content/7531795

OGG Theora Sprint So, now we are in an OGG Theora Book Sprint in the HKW in Berlin. The Sprint is all about free video. There are 6 of us working from Berlin, and you can join too! To do so follow these simple steps : 1. Register Register at FLOSS Manuals: http://en.flossmanuals.net/register 2. Contribute! Select the manual http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/TheoraCookbook/WebHome and a ...

Translation Tools Sprint Done ok...my posting comes a week after the fact, but the Translation Tools sprint made two very fine manuals. We were locked up in the turret of De Waag for 5 days and the incarceration was worth it! It was yet another astonishingly beautiful FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint location. The team worked hard out, 10am 10pm every day and were extremely productive. We fluctuated between ...

Open Translation Tools Open Translation Tools 09 is a conference organised by Aspiration Tech in collaboration with FLOSS Manuals and translate.org.za. Pictured below is Gunner from Aspiration and the OTT group. The topic is literally the same as the conference title an investigation of translation with regard to open source software, open processes, standards, open licenses etc. It is being ...

CiviCRM Sprint Done Phew...that was a long one...10 CiviCRM people, a chef, uncle bob, scout, one FLOSS Manuals chappy, and 5 days. The result...a 262 page book introducing the fundamentals about CiviCRM and how to evaluate your needs, and translate them into the framework of CiviCRM. The book is called 'Introducing CiviCRM, A Guide for Non profits'. You can check it out here : http://en.flossmanuals ...

CiviCRM Sprint The CiviCRM sprint is underway in the Sierra Mountains near Lake Tahoe. Gathered are 10 CiviCRM experts and Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals. We also had some nice outings....the Sierra Mountains are beautiful. We are 3 days into it and making strong headway (215 pages written...now to refining it)...stay tuned!

Doc'ing it up with Civi So the CiviCRM Book Sprint is underway. We are in the mountains of California for a 5 day sprint to write a manual on how to use the wonderful CiviCRM software. Some of the core Civi team is here plus active consultants and implementors. If you would like to contribute then follow these steps: 1. Register Register at FLOSS Manuals: http://en.flossmanuals.net/register 2. Contribute ...

Binding FLOSS Manuals Adam Thomas (Berlin) recently tried some book binding with FLOSS Manuals materials. The results look very nice. He used a basic Japanese stitch with a thick card cover, and a paper tape spine. The books look nice, read well, hold together well, are quite cheap to make, and can be done quickly (probably about 15 minutes to make once the process is refined). We will document the ...

FLOSS Manuals Videos Two interviews done about FM during the Wintercamp in Amsterdam. Adam Hyde http://vimeo.com/4078924 Andy Oram http://vimeo.com/3819143

Pure Data Sprint is go! The Pure Data Sprint is underway with locations in Berlin and New York. We have hooked up a video conference which is on the whole time so we can discuss issues between the two teams. The link up is working well, with good conversations happening between the spaces. Writing is marching on, with fantastic material being produced. By the end of Monday the first version of the ...

PureData Sprint When : April 4,5,6 Where : Berlin, New York, online FLOSS Manuals is proud to announce a three day book sprint for the Pure Data FLOSS Manual. This sprint will take place simultaneously in New York City and Berlin from Saturday 4 April to Monday 6 April. The Pure Data FLOSS Manual (as yet unreleased): http://en.flossmanuals.net/puredata There are possibilities to participate ...

Introduction to the Command Line Done So, 0 book in 2 days, Yeah yeah you thought. Sure. Well, to prove a point we just finished another book in 2 days. Entirely original content, written online and onsite. The manual is an Introduction to the GNU/Linux Command Line. Its designed for the beginner and written by friendly experts. The Sprint happened March 22 23 at the Libre Planet event at Harvard ...

Firefox Sprint Done! You didnt think it was possible? 0 book in 2 days...no? Well here it is : http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback book/firefox/6480979 You can also see the manual here http://en.flossmanuals.net/firefox We need to do a few tweaks, but it was only two days, so I guess that can be expected. Here is a pick of most of the team that was onsite : There were more people involved too, ...

Firefox Sprint 0 book in 2 days...is it possible? We think so. So yesterday and today Janet Swisher and Adam Hyde are working with tech writers at the Doctrain West conference (Palm Springs). Yes its that place with street names like Dinah Shore Drive and Sonny Bono Concourse...golf course to the stars, and we are here for 2 days as Guests of Scott Able (organisier of Doctrain), staying in Rancho ...

Wintercamp Video Made by Mick Fuzz : http://blip.tv/file/1879311

Coming soon to a town near you... So, it looks like things are starting to heat up in the FM camp. We just had a wonderful Wintercamp and the energy in the community is astonishing. I'll ask some FMers to blog here about there experiences at Wintercamp when the dust settles a bit. For a sneak preview, heres some photos of the dinner Marv (FM NZ) cooked up at a local squat on the second to last night ...

Coming Attractions FLOSS Manuals Summit Discussing all things FM. March 2 8. Amsterdam. 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 ...

Mini Sprint We held our first mini sprint in Berlin a few days ago, over a weekend at the Cafe Oberholz. It was a very relaxed day with lots of good coffee, good soup, and time hanging out as well as writing some materials for a manual on how to stream events with Free Software. We stayed for 5 hours each day. Cafe Oberholz was sometimes a little slow on the bandwidth, but who cares? Good people to ...

FLOSSify One Done! FLOSSify 1 : Digital Foundations is all done! So after three days of turning the Digital Foundations book into a textbook using only free software in its examples we are done! It was an amazing time, with a steady group of about 6 8 people and peaking at around 12 at any one time. There was also remote contributions during the day from people we did and didn't know. All in all ...

FLOSSify 1 : Day Two Day Two is humming along with the help of coffee and bagels. Focusing this morning on Scribus and KompoZer. Above is a photo of a screen Chris Blount was working on yesterday converting an Illustrator example (on the left) to an Inkscape example (right). Below is a screenshot of our handy edit notification feature showing the index of the book and who is editing what in real time ...

FLOSSify One is Go! FLOSSify 1 : Digital Foundations is off to a good start. We have about 9 people here at Eyebeam (New York) converting the design textbook Digital Foundations to FLOSS. We have broken the book down into sections dedicated to a free software. The softwares we are choosing include : Inkscape GIMP KompoZer FireFox Scribus gedit Processing The team has made good progress ...

FLOSSify 1 : Digital Foundations For a long time educational courses have been cheap marketing for proprietary software companies. Can a student really afford all those expensive softwares required by the courses? No. Ever hear of a software company kicking up a fuss because students are using 'unofficial' versions? Well, it does happen but not often. And why not? Because proprietary software companies ...

Upcoming FM Events feb 6 8 Eyebeam, New York Digital Foundations / FM Book Sprint Conversion of the Digital Foundations text book into free software http://digital foundations.net feb 9 11 NYC OReilly Tools of Change Conference FLOSS Manuals presentation about Book Sprints http://www.toccon.com/toc2009 march 3 7 Amsterdam Network Cultures Winter Camp FLOSS Manuals summit ...

FLOSS Manuals Release Circumvention Book, How To Bypass Internet Censorship December 4, 2008, Amsterdam A new book released by FLOSS Manuals, How to Bypass Internet Censorship, describes circumvention tools and explains why you might want to use them, and honestly describes the risks you must consider before circumventing blockers or monitors. Blockers and monitors restrict access to areas of the ...

OLPC Documentation The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) roll out of 100,000 laptops has begun. The exciting news is that the laptops now carry the documentation created in FLOSS Manuals embedded within the 'Help Activity'. Below are some images of the laptop and how the activity appears : The manual was written in FM and then remixed using our remix feature, output to HTML and included on the laptop. Since ...

Circumvention Book Sprint Done The Book Sprint on circumvention tools is done. Zero book in 5 days. Check it out : Its pretty cool.......you can get to the manual online from the front page of FLOSS Manuals or buy the book from the book store (see FM front page or http://www.lulu.com/content/4904448 ). The sprint was fantastic fun, although I have now a new term 'Sprint Lag' which is the jet ...

Circumvention Sprint Update The Book Sprint is going well in the Catskills. We have some interesting contributers and we are getting lots done while not forgetting to have fun. The manual will be called 'ByPassing Internet Censorship' and with luck we will be able to finish the original outlined content today leaving one extra day to spice it up with extras...watch the FM book store!

Circumvention Book Sprint The Circumvention Book Sprint is almost on its way! Circumvention is the term for staying anonymous online and routing around blocks put in place by governments etc. We start planning on Sunday (9th) and then write from Monday (10th) until the 15th (Saturday). There will be 7 people onsite and we will also be working with others (you!?) remotely. We also have some nice material ...

Book Store 2.0 Released At FLOSS Manuals labs Aco has had his head buried deep in code and produced our Book Store 2.0. We announced the first version of our embeddable book store last week. We used the tools at lulu.com but unfortunately the tools were not very configurable, and after several attempts to contact the people at lulu to ask questions we gave up and built a better embeddable shop. The ...

FLOSS Manuals at Aspiration Dev Summit Founder Adam Hyde will be at the Aspiration Tech Dev Summit in San Franciso Nov 16 19.Adam will present the FLOSS Manuals toolset, and the Book Sprint idea and process. http://devsummit08.aspirationtech.org/index.php?title Sessions List#FLOSS Manuals Tools http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/devsummit08

Inkscape Released! The Inkscape manual created by the fabulous Inkscape Documentation team has been released! You can see it here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/Inkscape The manual was written in Paris during the Google sponsored Inkscape Book Sprint. The manual is extremely well written and useful. The team intends to extend the manual to another 16 chapters, and it will also soon be available in French ...

Some Posts about FLOSS Manuals OLPC News has two posts about the Book Sprint we did with them : http://www.olpcnews.com/software/sugar/olpc sugar book sprint preparations.html http://www.olpcnews.com/software/sugar/olpc sugar book sprint action.html Washington OLPC Learning club : http://olpclearningclub.org/2008/10/ OLPC News Forum: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic 3761.msg26140 ...

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://en.flossmanuals.net/bookstore/bookstore.css"); /style img src "http://www.flossmanuals.net/bookstore/bookstore.gif" style "margin bottom:5px;" script type "text/javascript" src "http://stores.lulu.com/feed.php?fStore ...

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 ...