It is easy enough to point out what is wrong with something and harp on about how it should be. It’s another issue to actually do something about it.
To resolve this, I am involved in a not-for-profit foundation called FLOSS Manuals. We are a community of free documentation writers committed to writing excellent documentation about free software. Anyone can join FLOSS Manuals and anyone can edit the material we publish. All content is licensed under a free license (the GPL).
When we started (the actual point of genesis is hard to determine but we officially launched in October 2007), there was, and still is, no good publication platform for collaborative authoring. Some may say that there are too many Content Management Systems already and surely, SURELY, there must be a CMS to meet our needs?
Well, no. The closer you get to identifying the needs of collaborative publishing systems, the further you stray from the functionality of most Content Management Systems. So we have hacked our way into the wonderful TWiki and developed our own set of plugins. TWiki has proven to be a very good platform for online publication. It has all the structured content features and user administration that make it a good shell for authoring collaborative content. What was missing, and what is missing from other CMSes is good copyright and credit tracking, easy ways to build indexes, and a nifty way to remix content.
However, we have remedied that now with our own custom plugins (which are available through the TWiki repository). There are still some things we need, in fact it’s quite a long list, but piece by piece we are turning TWiki into a publication engine. Currently, we are working on translation workflow features (also in plugin form).
Remixing
So, the word ‘remix’ may have caught your eye and you may have fleetingly thought ‘remixing manuals?!’. It might not seem intuitive at first glance but there are a lot of very good reasons why manuals are excellent material for remixing. I don’t mean remix in the William S Burroughs sense of cut-up… we do cherish linearity in the world of free documentation. I mean remix as in “re-combining multiple chapters from multiple disparate manuals to form one document.” Doing this enables you to create manuals specific to your needs whether they be for self-learning, teaching, in-house training or whatever purpose.
The FLOSS manuals remix feature (http://www.flossmanuals.net/remix) enables the remixing of content into indexed-PDF and downloadable-HTML (in zip or tar compressed form) with your own look and feel (CSS). Now we have also added a Remix API. This means that you can remix manuals and include them in your website by cutting and pasting a few lines of HTML – no messy ftp necessary…
This part of FLOSS Manuals is new and in test form, but it works very well and the possibility for combining remix with print-on-demand is an obvious next step. It can be done now as print-on-demand services use PDF as their source material, but the trick is in getting it to look nice in print form…
Print on Demand
In addition to the free online manuals FLOSS Manuals material is also turned into books via a print-on-demand service. The books look very nice, having been tweaked to look good in print, and they are available at cost price (we don’t put any mark-up on the books so they cost what the print-on-demand company charge to produce and send to the buyer). This is pretty exciting and I hope that we will soon see FLOSS Manuals on the bookshelves of retailers: bookshops after-all are a very important promotional venue for free software.
I find that the books themselves actually get the idea of what FLOSS Manuals is doing very effectively to most people I talk to. Imagining a website is one thing, but handing over a book sparks the understanding and gets people excited. So books are an excellent promotional medium for FLOSS Manuals as much as for the software (it’s a symbiotic relationship after-all).
I imagine print-on-demand will play a bigger role in the future of FLOSS Manuals. There are many possible paths, but, in the end, it comes down to capacity and we are this stage a very small organisation. If you wish to get involved with this (exciting) part of our evolution then let me know…
Quality Control
Lastly, a word on quality. The manuals aim to be better than any available documentation (sometimes this is not hard as there is often no other available documentation!) Keeping this level of quality has some interesting issues when working with an open system. Anyone can contribute to FLOSS Manuals – it is completely open. You need to register but this is not a method for gating contributions, it is there so we can abide by the license requirements of the GPL to credit authorship. Additionally, credit should be given where contributions have been made so we also credit modifications in the manuals.
SPAM is an obvious issue with an open system, as is the possibility of malicious content. Incorrect or malicious information in Wikipedia might lead you to quote the wrong King of Scotland or may misinform yo7u about the origins of potatoes, but incorrect information in documentation might lead you to wipe out your operating system. So we separate the ‘back end’ – where you can write manuals – from the ‘front end’ – where you can read manuals.
Manuals in the ‘WRITE’ section (http://www.flossmanuals.net/write) are in constant development. However, the same manual linked from the front page will be in the ‘stable’ form. This is managed by some existing TWiki tools that we twisted together to form a simple one-step publishing system. It works like this – every manual has a Maintainer. A Maintainer is a person – a volunteer – that keeps an eye on that particular manual. Edits and updates carry on through the WRITE section by anyone that wishes to contribute. When the Maintainer thinks the manual is in good form and an update is appropriate, they push the ‘publish’ button and all the material is copied to the ‘front end’ version of the manual.
This way, the reader gets stable reliable documentation, and the writers can continue working on those docs without the reader being confronted by half-finished content etc. It’s a simple and effective system.
How you can help
Good free documentation is a necessary component of all good free software. If you can’t program or don’t want to, but you love free software and want to help, then help make free documentation!
Knowing where to contribute is now easy! You can :
read manuals – http://www.flossmanuals.net
write manuals – http://www.flossmanuals.net/write
or remix manuals – http://www.flossmanuals.net/remix
We have a growing number of very talented contributors and Maintainers and good manuals available online, but we need more manuals and more contributors. Contributing is pretty easy, and if you would like to be a part of helping create good manuals, then register with the project (http://www.flossmanuals.net/register) and read our manual on FLOSS Manuals (http://www.flossmanual.net/flossmanuals).
Anyone can contribute. You can spell-check documents, tidy up the layout, suggest ways of improving docs, test/review material, design icons, write or improve any material. Contribute in any way that you can and you will be helping not only to make the documentation better, but you will be assisting in the development and spread of free culture and free software.