Wikibooks & FLOSS Manuals

Hello Wikibooks,

I went to Wikimania recently and met Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals.
http://flossmanuals.net/ FLOSS Manuals is run by a not-for-profit org
based in the Netherlands. Their motto is "free manuals for free
software" and they write documentation for free/libre open source
software packages using TWiki. Some differences in their approach
compared to Wikibooks:
* Twiki has a 'publish' mechanism - so the 'read' version of a manual
is probably not the latest revision. When they feel a chapter has
become reasonably stable, that 'publish' that version so it goes live.
* They aim their manuals at absolute newbies (check out how detailed
their 'install' instructions are to see what I mean).
* they more or less write for print - that means no links.

So I think they have different enough goals that there is enough space
for both projects to coexist peacefully. :)

They are a very new group, but have got one manual into working
condition - for Audacity, the audio editing software.
http://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/ Adam brought a print copy along
to Wikimania and I was really impressed by it. There is just something
cool about having something *tangible* in your hands. Especially for
people who do not take to technology like fish to water -- so probably
unlike a good many Wikimedians.

I was also impressed because I know a lot of Wikimedians use Audacity
to create speech files for Wiktionary, or spoken articles for
Wikipedia. (I don't know if there are any spoken books, but it could
happen. :)) So it strikes me that there is good potential for
collaboration here.

I hope to do some work to try and develop a book that would be useful
for images on Commons, ie GIMP+Inkscape.

BTW at the moment their license is GPL, but they are discussing what
license to use on the mailing list. Also, as they have relatively few
contributors for each book, I believe it would be quite easy to get
relicensing permission for GFDL if one so desired.

Anyway I just thought I would let you guys know about this group, if
you didn't already, and  maybe think about some interesting ways we
could collaborate with them. I would be interested to hear what people
think.

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/