Re: Plone manuals and Connexions (cnx.org)

Hi,

On 7/28/11 11:12 AM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote:
> The example the Connexions people gave is that they got funding to hire someone to write a statistics textbook for five community colleges.  The cost of printing on cnx.org varies from $5 for spiral bound to $20 for hardcover with binding.  It meant that the participating colleges saved a lot of money for their students, and since everything on cnx.org uses the CC license, anyone can use the textbook and print it if they wish.
>
> In addition, the example given was that if someone at say UW Oshkosh likes the textbook but doesn't agree with one particular section of it, he/she can rewrite that one section and thread it in with the rest of the textbook and make his/her own variation.
>
> So in the case of a Plone user manual, if we got the "official" one hosted on cnx.org, anyone could print it easily at low cost, and anyone who wanted to modify a portion of it for their own use or own organization could do so.  That would have been of immediate practical use to us at UW Oshkosh, since we wouldn't have had to write our own manual (by cutting and pasting into some document editor); we could have picked and chosen the portions of the official manual we wanted, and made our own out of those portions plus any we wanted to write that were specific to our users.  And we would have been able to do it on the cnx.org platform.
>
> The cnx.org people have made the basis for their service available for free use; it's called Rhaptos.
>
> The other big selling point for us is that Rhaptos and cnx.org are built with Plone, so the UI will be in large part familiar to any Plone user.
>
> Does that help?


Ah! Well it explains connexions a bit more at least. But I'm afraid I 
have no idea how to make this work within the Plone community. The usual 
approach is to just mail the list (which you have done) and then if no 
one complains vehemently (which they have not, yet) then just go do it 
(and wait for more complaints, which hopefully will not come).


I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the plone.org/documentation is 
effectively licensed (if not overtly or inherently so) under some sort 
of GPL or CC license; which means you may already have permission to do 
this. When in doubt, just email: board-z4DKO/[email protected] and ask.



HTH,



Alex




>
> 	Kim
>
> On Jul 28, 2011, at 9:43 AM, Alex Clark wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 7/27/11 12:08 AM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote:
>>> At the Plone Symposium 2011 at Penn State the keynote was by Connexions (http://cnx.org).  Their service allows content creators to reuse and remix anyone else's content hosted on their site, whether that's books or technical manuals, by taking the parts of a document they like, changing some of it, or adding/removing other parts, and making a new version of a document.
>>>
>>> I thought about how University of Wisconsin Oshkosh has created its own Plone user manuals (http://www.uwosh.edu/training/training-manuals/) for Plone and Plone forms, and how we had to create them by cutting and pasting portions of the Plone user manual on plone.org, adding our own screen shots, and our own text.
>>>
>>> Ideally, if the Plone user manual and other documentation currently on plone.org were to be hosted on cnx.org, any organization or integrator or client could take one of any number of variants of the cnx.org Plone manuals, modify it slightly and make it their own very easily.
>>>
>>> I'd like to know what you think of this idea.  Is this something we could try pursuing with one of the shorter Plone manuals?
>>
>>
>> I don't understand (probably because I am not familiar with the
>> Connexions service). Can you give a more practical example?
>>
>> In general, it sounds fine but I think a "real life example" might
>> facilitate a better discussion about what exactly is being offered here.
>> And what may be involved in achieving it.
>>
>>
>> Alex
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> 	Kim
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Alex Clark · http://aclark.net
>>
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