FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


October 25, 2011

(Palo Alto, California) Google Summer of Code Event Marks the Start of Four New Books On Free Software

From October 17th to 21st, members of various Google Summer of Code (GsoC) projects gathered, along with others from the worlds of publishing and software, for a collaborative documentation event known as the Google Summer of Code Documentation Sprint.  

The 5-day event represents a collaboration between Google, Aspiration, and FLOSS Manuals, an international organization committed to producing free manuals for free software. The software projects represented were OpenMRS, KDE, Sahana, and OpenStreetMap, and the event itself was facilitated by FLOSS Manuals founder and lead facilitator Adam Hyde. Of the event, Adam said, “This event takes Book Sprints to a new level. We brought 30 people to this event with the promise of producing 4 books in 3 days. That sounds very fast and I think the groups were scared of the prospect and many didn't think they could do it. 3 days later and each project had produced and published their own book. My organization has really spent a lot of time refining the methodology so that this kind of event is possible.”

Upon conclusion of the sprint, the documentation was exported from the “sprint-preferred” Booki.cc software into the Lulu.com bookstore. This is a new feature and an incredible achievement as the software (developed by FLOSS Manuals) now completes its promise of an end-to-end publishing solution – providing collaborative book production environment, output formatting, and now publishing to print on demand services and ebooks.

GSoC is an annual international program in which Google (in partnership with selected open source software projects) offers student developers the opportunity to participate in open source development by writing code. The GsoC Documentation Summit is a new initiative aiming to stimulate the evolution of a free (as in “free and open source”) technical documentation sector, and increase the quality and amount of free documentation about free software. The GsoC Documentation Summit featured a two-day “unconference” hosted by Allen Gunn and Aspiration Technology, and a three-day Book Sprint facilitated by Adam Hyde and FLOSS Manuals.

Book Sprints are a collaborative book production methodology pioneered by FLOSS Manuals.

For more information, see:
http://www.flossmanuals.org
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/09/sprinting-for-open-source.html
http://www.aspirationtech.org
http://www.booksprints.net

Contact:
Camille E. Acey
FLOSS Manuals
+1 (347) 267 2016
press@flossmanuals.net

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