blog.booki.cc

In a Book Sprint a ‘chapter’ is a rather arbitrary unit. Its not possible to say (in a general sense) that a chapter is so many words or pages, or should start at x and finish at y. A chapter is instead a way for the group to think about what needs to go into the book. At the beginning when the Table of Contents is generated chapters are really  ‘bullet points’. The list of chapter titles is a list of content identifiers  – the content for each unit is suggested by the title of the chapter. That means, pretty much that it is a very contextual signifier and as a facilitator you must listen to how the sprinters talk about the book, chapters and content and this will help you work out the appropriate granularity (scope for chapters).

Knowing if the ToC is getting too long is really more art than science. At the beginning of the sprint you just have to listen and gauge from the discussions how much content needs to be generated. When you think the ToC is getting unmanageable you then have to pull the group back a little and focus on refining the ToC and getting it to an achievable length. The only key here is experience. As the sprint continues you can rely more heavily on a reviewing process. Review the material frequently both by yourself and with the group to get a sense of how far you have to go as the sprint proceeds. In later stages of the sprint it is not unusual to forbid chapters to be included. I say ‘forbid’ because it can actually come to this. Sprinters that are eager to get their pet subject into the book will often throw as many arguments as they can at you to convince you there material is necessary. Be very wary of this – if at a certain point you think that some material must be prioritised over other material you may need to be very forceful and explicit to keep everyone on track.

It will always occur that the group wants to change the chapter order and add chapters as the sprint goes. You should encourage this and encourage sprinters to talk about the reasons why they want to make a change with the others before they make it. It is less common that they want to delete chapters. However increasing the quality of the sprint often involves the process of destroying and merging the chapters. Sometimes a series of chapters may make sense as a series but somehow do not give a rewarding reading experience. They may repeat content or dependencies for narrative or arguments may be out of order, or they just somehow feel ‘disconnected’. The art of getting a good final ToC and really meaty chapters often relies on to identifying the right moment to pull everyone to a stop and create a working group to go through groups of chapters and ‘make them whole’. That requires a lot of contemplation and thought and the best way to do that is to send the nominated group away with a complete print out (each) of the chapters up for review and get them to read them top to toe and make notes on the pages. Then the group should meet and rework the material. Usually I do not start this kind of reworking until the 4th day of a 5 day sprint.

You may be asked ‘what is a chapter’ by the group and its a fair question but pretty much impossible to answer. When asked I think my standard response is that a chapter contains as much as you can write about under that title. Thats not really clarifying but somehow people don’t seem to need much more than that.

In a Book Sprint the first thing you do after you have had a coffee and made introductions is to explain a little about the process. The next thing you do is create a Table of Contents (ToC). The ToC cannot (except in specific circumstances) be generated before the sprint begins for the following reasons :

1. if a minority of the participants or (worse still) people not attending the sprint try and create a ToC you will end up confusing the sprint participants. Creating a Table of Contents is a process of ‘getting your head into the content’ if a team does this and then hands it onto the sprint team then this later group must go into the content ‘cold’ and try and work out what the ToC creators had in their head. This is a really bad situation and will just confuse the sprint team and damage the end result. If you don’t trust your sprint team to write the Table of Contents then either you are the wrong person to Shepard the process or your team is wrong – you should think about which one it is very carefully.
2. only the people in the sprint (remote or real space participants) can write the book – no one else. So they must write the book they can write. There is no point in giving them a Table of Contents and then find out that actually x% of the book cannot be written by anyone at the sprint. If you think you would not fall prey to this mistake and you know the people better and know exactly what they can and can’t write then you are wrong.
3. if you try and create a Table of Contents before the sprint then probably you are doing this without the blessing of an experienced sprint facilitator. That also means that you are probably going to have no idea of how much content can actually be created in a sprint. In my experience this leads to people creating a ToC for an extended library – covering every possible subject connected to the book -  not a single book.
4. creating a ToC without the sprint team means you remove a lot of the fun and challenge of the event for the sprint participants. Fun and challenge are the essential ingredients for sprinting a good book.
5. who said you could create a ToC better than the one that the sprint participants will create. Don’t you trust them? Are you really better? Isn’t that just a little arogant+ sad?

However despite innumerable warnings many people, particularly those used to management roles, will try and ‘prepare’ for the sprint. If you are like this and succumb to ‘pre-sprint fear’ – a anxiety that I have seen a lot and whose symptoms are more or less the same as those for ‘fear of failure’ – and you prepare a Table of Contents as a placebo then you need to stop. You are only damaging the sprint – your anxieties have no place being articulated in a Table of Contents for a book that others will write.

If on the other hand you are a sprint facilitator then you have to prepare for the fact that before the sprint you might be confronted by this kind of behaviour. In my opinion you do not have any other option but to express confidence, articulate the process, and be direct. Anxieties being what they are, can get out of hand – the earlier you take control of the process and dictate the process before the sprint the better shape you will be in to guide the group to a successful finish line. If (and I have found myself in this position a few times) someone ignores your advice and does a lot of useless pre-production (in the form of ToC generation) then you must simultaneously ignore their product but make them feel like they haven’t completely wasted their time. Tricky. One possible way to manage this is to thank them infront of the group for this work, explain the group process of creating a ToC, and state that once the ToC is generated it would be great to come back to the ‘pre-produced ToC’ and see if there is anything ‘we have missed’.

Actually Sprint Fear is relatively common and you should expect to encounter it. Its pretty much the normal way of reacting given we have come to learn that book production is a long expert process that we can’t access, understand, or contribute to. Given this cultural context its understandable that producing a book in a week with no pre-production sounds scary. However don’t let that understandable fear get in the way of committing to the sprint process and producing a great book.

I’m reading a really fantastic book at the moment about the history of paper “Paper before print” by Jonathon M Bloom. Really worth checking out…it has a wonderful introduction to the history of paper which opened my eyes to the importance of paper in the history of transmitting ideas. Books are afterall just a clever way to keep as much paper together in one place to communicate an idea bigger than one sheet. Which is why we can talk meaningfully about a 2 page book – sometimes 2 pages is enough.

Now books are looking for a new form since the paper is, for the first time since the death of parchment, no longer necessary. Paper it seems, will return to its first role – packaging. A strangely circular media history.

Anyways,  there was one very nice piece in “Paper before print” that caught my attention. It caught my imagination because of a tangent – I had been thinking of how to write a book about Book Sprints and so I have been thinking about the important ingredients of Book Sprints. The piece reads:

"...the Greeks[...]began representing all their language sounds, not only the
 consonants and long vowels[...]This made the crucial gain in legibility and
 accuracy in the transcription of sounds."

In otherwords, the Greeks started representing their spoken language in text so each spoken sound had a textual equivalent. Text became a way of transcribing sound.

I like this very much because it means in a way, that books are noisy objects. We have come to think of books as quiet items – they are written in solitude and read in solitude. There are other ways of looking at this – Bob Stein talks of reading and writing as being inherently social processes (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/what_ive_learned_since_posting.html) and I have heard him speak of books being places ‘where readers and writers meet’ (http://toccon.blip.tv/file/1781125/). In this sense they are noisy objects too since books trigger discussion in society – their effect is in discourse and that’s inherently noisy.

However…I was really thinking of noise in Book Sprints. I always say to a new sprint group ‘sprints are noisy environments’. They very much are – you cannot write a book quickly or well with other people if you do not talk to them. The conversation then continues through the text and back to the table. It goes around and around in a circular speech-to-text-to-speech process. Book Sprints are noise that is not just ‘transcribed’ into text but it is itself a discussion.

Anyways, I got there via tangents but I very much like the ideas of books representing noise – Book Sprints are, for me, another way to think about noisy books.

Sourcefabric just did a Book Sprint using the FLOSS Manuals implementation of booki (http://booki.flossmanuals.net). They produced a rather nice book for their Newscoop software. They are a friendly Open Source company so they wanted to share their CSS with others so you too can learn some nice Booki CSS tricks…here it is:

body {
font-family: "Gill Sans";
font-size:11pt;
background: #fff;
color: #000;
}

.unseen{
z-index: -66;
margin-left: -1000pt;
}

.objavi-chapter{
color: #000;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
}

h1 strong.initial{
color: #000;
font-size: 2em;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
}

.objavi-subsection{
display: block;
page-break-before: always;
/*  page-break-after: always;*/
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 20pt;
}

body .objavi-subsection:first-child{
page-break-before: avoid;
}

.objavi-subsection .initial {
font-size: 1em;
color: #000;
}

.objavi-subsection-heading{
font-size: 36pt;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
margin-bottom: 2em;
}

h1 {
text-transform: uppercase;
page-break-before: always;
background: white;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
}

/*h1.first-heading {
page-break-before: avoid;
}*/

h2 {
text-transform: uppercase;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
}
strong {
font-family: "Gill Sans MT";
font-weight:normal;
}
a {
text-decoration:none;
color:#000;
word-wrap: break-word;
}

table {
float: none;
}

h1.frontpage{
font-size: 64pt;
text-align: center;
page-break-after: always;
page-break-before: avoid;
max-width: 700px;
}

div.copyright{
padding: 1em;
}

table.toc {
/*border: 1px dotted #999;*/
font-size: 11pt;
width: 95%;
}

td.chapter {
padding-right: 2em;
text-align: right;
}

td.pagenumber {
text-align: right;
}

td.section {
font-size: 1.1em;
/* this takes care of padding in toc */
padding-top: 1.3em;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: "Gill Sans Condensed";
}

p, li {
page-break-inside: avoid;
}

pre, code, tt {
font-family: "Courier", "Courier New", monospace;
font-size: 0.8em;
}

pre {
max-width:100%;
word-wrap: break-word;
}

img {
max-width: 80%;
height: auto;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
}

/* this makes sure h2 + h3 stick with next paragraph */
.objavi-no-page-break {
page-break-inside: avoid;
}

The book they worked on can be seen here:
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/newscoop-cookbook2/edit/

Here is an example PDF output of the book using this CSS:

http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/newscoopcookbook2-en-2011.04.22-14.03.27.pdf

We are starting our translations (localisation) of the booki interface. If you would like to help translate booki into Spanish please visit here:

http://www.booki.cc/selftranslate/es/

We are experimenting with our new localisation tool – so please help us do this first translation and then we will set up more languages (and enable anyone to start a translation).

Sugar Labs will shortly announce the availability of a booki server for creating Open Education Resources (OER) in a new project for Replacing Textbooks. The short version of the rationale is that computers cost less than printed textbooks, so as soon as we replaced the textbooks with OER for enough subjects at enough grade levels for enough countries (and states or provinces in the largest countries) in enough languages, the OLPC program will improve education while saving money.

I would like to think that this will make adoption of OLPC XOs and other such computers running Sugar and other OER software and content a no-brainer. But I know better. Governments have almost no idea how to deploy renewable electricity and Internet all the way out to their most remote villages, and there are other institutional and political obstacles.

Our sysadmin and I are working out how many different kinds of permission he has to give me in order to make this all work. We are down to Web page content, templates, and .css design.

So, can anybody list off the different permissions for administering and building a booki site? We know about book management, Objavi, and the underlying Django. How do I get in to edit pages, or at least upload pages and other files that I create offline?

Everything we learn in this project will go into a new booki manual on FLOSSManuals.net.

We are also asking for donations at Crowdrise.

Booki has had some amazing new features recently developed and they go along way towards remixing and forking content that is already available on Booki. We need to thank Sourcefabric who sponsored the development of these new features as well as the developers for these features being established quickly.  So, if there is a particular feature that you are dying to have added to Booki, get together with others who also want it added and sponsor it’s development, that way you know it will be developed in a timely fashion.

Alright back to Booki’s new features, they include the ability to Hide one of your Books from the list of books available on your Booki install, Cloning a Book from any Booki install and Importing a chapter from another book into your book.

Hiding Books

This is a great feature if you just created a book and don’t want the whole world to start editing it while you are still trying to develop a vision or outline for the book. Another case where you may use this feature is if you are creating a book intended for just a few people to read or edit. Examples include a book being created by students in a classroom, or a guide book/code of conduct for a local club such as a sports club or video filming club, in both examples you only want a small group to be working on the book, class members and club members respectively. Once the book is hidden you can hand out the book’s URL (e.g. http://www.booki.cc/hamilton-video-filming-club-guide-book/) to the people intended to create the content.

Use: To hide a book go to your My Books page, on the right hand side of each book in your list is a button labeled Hide from others . Simply click this to hide your book. The book is removed from the list of available books on the Books page and the button’s label changes to  Show to others , which you can click at a later time to add it back to the list of books available on Booki.

Importing/Cloning a Booki Book

Booki has always had an import feature, allowing you to import an existing book from archive.org, wikibooks or any ePub document into Booki so it can be worked on using Booki’s tool-set and also gaining a wider distribution. Now, Booki can effectively duplicate any book that is already on an installation of Booki by importing it to your My Books list.

This tool has several uses, first, if there is a book that has useful information for your work on Booki but it is on another Booki installation from the one you use. Looking at the video filming club example from above, the club is collaboratively developing books for its members on the different aspects of filming and developing video, (e.g. Script writing, Cinematography). One of its members notices a book on Kdenlive at booki.flossmanuals.net. The club recommends the Kdenlive video editor to its members as it relatively powerful and stable while also being free software, making it very desirable compared to the large price tags of propriety editing software. The club wants to add this book to its Group at www.booki.cc. They can simply import it from booki.flossmanuals.net into www.booki.cc.

Another use is if you want to fork a book. Forking is the process of taking an existing book and then modifying it to fit with your particular needs or desires. Forking has been used a lot in the free software community, one group will build on an existing proven application and modify it for their particular purposes (Some notable software forks are Ubuntu – a Linux distribution forked from the Debian distribution, NeoOffice – a fork of OpenOffice optimised for use on Mac OS X). Carrying on the video filming club example,the Kdenlive book could be modified after importing to suit the club members’ particular needs.

Use: Go to My Books and at the bottom of the page, under the Import Book section, click on the drop box next to Import type.  Then select Import Booki, and add the URL for the homepage (e.g. http://www.booki.cc/booki-user-guide/)  of the book you want to import (remember this can be from the same Booki install that you are using or from different installation). You now have the option to enter a New title for your book, this can be useful if you want a title that fits in better with your uses for the book. Finally you can choose to have the new book hidden when it is first created, before clicking on Import.

Clone/Import Chapter

Chapter cloning enables you to copy a chapter from one book in Booki into another book. This is incredibly useful if a book contains a particular chapter that you would like to add to a book you are creating. In the Above example while the Video Filming club recommends the use of Kdenlive for editing they want their books to focus more on the techniques of editing rather than on how to use the software, so they make a new Video Editing book creating several chapters from scratch while only importing the CaptureVideo and LayoutAndControls chapters from the original Kdenlive book.

Use: The book that the chapter is coming from needs to be in the same Booki install as you are using, so if you want to pull a chapter from a book that is on a different install, you will first need to import the entire book into the Booki install that you use. Go to the Editing page of your book. At the top-right of the Table of Contents is an IMPORT CHAPTER Button, click on this to load the Clone chapter dialogue. In the Enter Book id box start typing the name of the book you want to copy the chapter from. The Clone chapter dialogue has an auto complete feature so as soon as you see the title that you want listed you can click on it. This jumps you to the  Enter Chapter id box where you start typing the name of the chapter you want to import, once again as soon as you see the title of the chapter you want, click on it. Just like the import book feature, you have the option of adding your own title to the chapter in the New title box before clicking on Clone chapter button. The new chapter is copied and added to the end of your Table of Contents.

The production of a book is usually very tightly controlled by the author(s) and publisher(s) that produce it. We have come to accept that as just the way it is. You want to write a book then naturally you have the right to decide what the text of that book will be.  Seems almost non-controversial.

So, its normal to be asked how can you exercise a similar amount of control over a book in Booki. Its an understandable question but very difficult to answer. Difficult because the answer has to cross paradigms – the first paradigm being the established book production and publishing model that we all know, and the second being book production with free licenses in an open system. So I usually find myself answering questions like this with a simple “You can’t” and wait for the reaction. It’s intended to be a provocative answer and the further the eyes roll back in the skull the more I know I have to unwrap the concept of ‘publishing’ in the new(ish) era of free culture for whoever it was that asked the question.

But the reality isn’t so simple – it’s much more interesting.

First there seems often to be an unspoken assumption that control is necessary, along with this comes the assumption that open content must be protected. Protected from harm – not just the malicious kind but harm inflicted by contributions that lower the quality of the text. My experience from 4 years running an entirely open system (FLOSS Manuals) is that there is little to fear except spam. In four years running FLOSS Manuals I have not seen a single malicious edit. It seems to be the case that if people are not interested in your book they will leave you alone. If they are interested I have found that the approaches to the text are sensitive and respectful and more often than not they improve the work – sometimes in very surprising ways. On one book I worked on a retired copy editor went from top to bottom of the 45,000 word text in his afternoons and made an incredible improvement to the text. I would like to have thanked him but I never met him.

The trick is not to protect the text but to manage it. To do this first you must make a decision on what kind of development process this is and what kind of contributions you would like.  From my experience the best strategy is to try and relinquish as much control as possible in order to achieve the right kind and amount of contributions. To this end Booki provides some very useful tools to help you. If you want to keep your book very quiet then you can hide a book so that it does not appear on booki at all except on your profile page. Privacy through obscurity. If you want to keep things really really quiet then you can grab the booki sources and install booki on your own server (or laptop) somewhere out of reach of anyone. If you want the book totally open for anyone to jump in then that is the default position with Booki all you have to do then is get the word out as much as you can and invite people to contribute. If you create a new book or chapter then that information gets broadcast on the front page of booki, however it is often harder than you think to attract attention and contributions. It often relies on how effectively you can get the word out and how attractive you make the offer. You need to reach out to people and inspire them. The more direct the approach the better – personal emails work best, emphasising concrete outcomes is very likely to improve results, as is making the offer fun, relevant and illustrating a real need. But the usual rules apply for attracting volunteers in any realm – its a mix of luck and getting the tone and channels right.

Once the contributions start rolling in then it’s up to you to manage this process. To this purpose there are a number of tools available in booki – most importantly the history tab where you can view changes and roll back to earlier versions of any chapter as you wish. If things get out of control you can clone (copy) the entire book and decide on a more moderate development approach. However the best tool for managing input and getting the book to where you want it to be is social management. You need to coerce the contributors to come along with you and share your vision of what the book should be. At the same time you need to also be able to make the process satisfying to them. We have tools available to help with this communicative process (chat, notes etc) but its often reliant on your tone and approach.

So ‘how to control’ a book is a question I would like to see asked more often with more nuance and colour to the question. However I think if you can lose the feeling that you must control the book and instead relinquish as much control as possible you will be surprised and very probably excited by the results. In a world of free culture its all about the art of losing control…

A new book has been published about Learning through Digital Media – http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net/

It features an article I wrote about using Booki for creating textbooks.

http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net/book-sprints-and-booki-re-imagining-how-textbooks-are-produced

We have a new Booki support site (http://support.booki.cc) that is linked from http://www.booki.cc and is also linked in the booki sources so if you install booki you may or may not wish to edit out the link. The support site has a link to a new mailing list (http://lists.booki.cc/listinfo.cgi/booki-booki.cc) and there is also a live chat. This is a webchat interfaced into irc (irc.freenode.net #booki). the webchat is for live self-help, meaning that hopefully you can help others or others can help you. The booki crew will also be in that chat room quite often.

Coming soon will also be a support site for archiving questions and solutions.

Now there is also a new Q&A community forum : http://support.booki.cc/

The chat is now linked at: http://support.booki.cc/chat