80 days ago by Andy Oram

I attended one of Berkman's panels of leading thinkers at Harvard on Monday, and picked up (legitimately) a copy of John Palfrey's new book, Intellectual Property Strategy. The speakers on Monday, who included household names of the free culture movement such as Lawrence Lessig and Eric von Hippel, ...

80 days ago by Andy Oram

The speakers, who included household names of the free culture movement such as Lawrence Lessig and Eric von Hippel, emphasized the culture shift that is breaking the seemingly iron grip of current policies that favor wealthy companies with portfolios of patents and copyrights. But I think even thes ...

113 days ago by Andy Oram

At several points during this week's documentation sprint at Google, I talked with the founder of FLOSS Manuals, Adam Hyde, who developed the doc sprint as it is practiced today. Our conversation often returned to the differences between the group writing experience we had this week and traditional ...

113 days ago by Andy Oram

Mixtures of grassroots content generation and unique expertise have existed, and more models will be found. Understanding the points of commonality between the systems will help us develop such models.

114 days ago by Andy Oram

The final day of the FLOSS Manuals documentation sprint at Google began with a bit of a reprieve from Sprintmeister Adam Hyde's dictum that we should do no new writing. He allowed us to continue work till noon, time that the KDE team spent partly in heated arguments over whether we had provided enou ...

114 days ago by Andy Oram

Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process.

115 days ago by Andy Oram

We started the second day of the FLOSS Manuals sprint with a circle encounter where each person shared some impressions of the first day. Several reported that they had worked on wikis and other online documentation before, but discovered that doing a book was quite different (I could have told them ...

115 days ago by Andy Oram

As a relatively conventional book, the KDE manual was probably a little easier to write (but also probably less fun) than the more high-level approaches taken by some other teams that were trying to demonstrate to potential customers that their projects were worth adopting.

115 days ago by Andy Oram

Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects.

116 days ago by Andy Oram

Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects (KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS, and Sahana Eden). Most participants were recruited on the basis of a dream and a promise, so going through the first third of our spr ...