The Ecocities Book Sprint in Cairo (Egypt) organised by IceCairo will be held between Feb 2 and 9. This Book Sprint will focus on working with locals to create a resource book documenting places of environmental/ecological interest in the city. It will be quite different to previous sprints in that it will be written as we explore Cairo with local residents.

Icecairo is a space where anyone working, or interested in working on social and environmental projects can go to collaborate on projects together. icecairo brings together a diverse community of action-oriented thinkers, doers and leaders in a dynamic, intelligent ecosystem, driving collaborative solutions for economic development.

Today at 5pm the Melange Book Sprint team finished a 5 day Book Sprint for the Google Open Source Programs Office. We documented the Melange platform as it is used for the Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in programs. In all we wrote about 45,000 words and cut it back to about 35,000 words in total over two manuals.

Adam Hyde will be holding a workshop on Book Sprints in New York, Feb 12. The workshop is part of the Tools of Change – a conference about the changing state of the publishing industry.

The workshop will be in an introduction to the Book Sprints and will cover many case studies and an outline of Book Sprint phases of production. We will also look briefly at Booktype, the collaborative book production platform. There will be plenty of time for discussion of Book Sprints and the Booktype.

http://www.toccon.com/toc2013/public/schedule/detail/26756

22-25 January 2013, University of Amsterdam as part of the DMI program. DMI is a New Media PhD (training) program as well as a New Media research group in Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. DMI is a collaboration of the New Media TEMLab, University of Amsterdam, Govcom.org, and the Mondriaan Foundation.

https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2013

Jan 30, 2013. Transmediale Festival, Berlin. There will be a panel discussion about the Book Sprint held in Dec 2012 for the festival.

transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology. The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 25 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.

http://www.transmediale.de/content/imaginary-museums-computationality-new-aesthetic-0

Starting today is a Book Sprint in San Francisco Google HQ. We are gathered to produce documentation about the open source Melange platform created by the Open Source Programs Office to service their GSoC (Google Summer of Code) and other programs.

We are 8 people and here for 5 days. We are initially developing a user manual and then possibly taking this forward to include some light developer docs.

So far we have created the Table of Contents in FLOSS Manuals (http://booki.flossmanuals.net) and started writing. The manual will follow a structure based on the needs of specific roles of people participating in GSoC.

The mix of people involved is really great – we have 4 of the project leaders for GSoC and 4 developers for the platform. That is a great mix for a manual since the developers know how a platform should work whereas the project managers know how the software actually works. This brings up great conversations and discoveries for all involved.

Update Day 2: We have 12000 words written now. This morning we went through the entire interface and workflow. Many of the staff had not seen a great deal of the interface as it is seen by different user roles. It was a really productive stage for internal edu as well as for informing the manual writing.

Update Day 5: almost done…20,000 words and lovely screen shots complete for the Google Summer of Code Melange manual. We then cloned the manual and re-purposed the content for the Google Code-in Melange manual. Working on this second manual now and hoping to get it done by the end of the day.

The Google Doc Camp is a 5 day event featuring a 2 day Unconference and a 3 day Book Sprint. Teams are chosen from applications and hosted at the Google Campus (Sunnyvale, California) for 5 intense days of discussion and production. There have been 2 Doc Camps so far on 2011, and 2012.

The following is a review taken from http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/01/google-document-sprint-2012-3-more.html

Google Document Sprint 2012 – 3 more Books Written in 3 days

Last month the Google Open Source Programs Office hosted its second Google Summer of Code Document Sprint where three open source projects successfully wrote an entire book documenting how to use their project’s software in less than a week.  The three open source projects that participated were the Evergreen Project, Etoys, and FontForge. The Evergreen Project is an integrated library system that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials.  Etoys is a child-friendly program language for use in education. And FontForge is an outline font editor that allows users to create and edit their own fonts. Dedicated volunteers came from all around the globe to collaborate with one another to create a book their entire project would be able to reference and update for years to come.

Below is a guest post from Kathy Lussier, an Evergreen participant describing the process of this fast and furious way to collaboratively write a book on software documentation.

How long does it take to write a 116-page manual introducing Evergreen administrators to basic setup, configuration and maintenance? If you bring together a dedicated documentation team, great facilitators, and the right environment, it turns out you can do it with just three days (or closer to two and a half days) of focused writing.

Lindsay Stratton (from left), Robert Soulliere, Kathy Lussier and Dan Scott at the Googleplex for the Google Summer of Code Documentation Sprint.

I had the opportunity to work last week with four of my Evergreen colleagues to create such a manual. Traveling to Mountain View, California, I joined Robert Soulliere of Mohawk College, Lindsay Stratton ofPioneer Library System and Dan Scott of Laurentian University for the Google Summer of CodeDocumentation Sprint. Our final team member, Jim Keenan of C/W MARS, could not make the trip, but joined us daily via Google+ Hangouts to make his contributions to the effort.

On day 1, Allen Gunn (Gunner) of Aspiration facilitated an unconference where participants collaborated on topics like keeping documentation up to date with rapid development, user communities, documentation tools, and documentation-driven development. The unconference helped the participants become comfortable with one another enabling them to  speak freely about their ideas and opinions and began the team-building process that continued through the rest of the week.

By the end of the first day, the team had created a title and tagline for our future book: Evergreen in Action: So you’ve installed Evergreen — now what?

The target audience for the book is Evergreen administrators who have successfully installed Evergreen and now need to load data and configure the system. The goal was not to provide a comprehensive overview for each possible configuration option in the system, but to present the basic steps required to get up and running, focusing on common use cases. With the basic framework in our heads, we entered day two with what was to be the most difficult part of the process: creating a table of contents for the book. Adam Hyde of Floss Manuals provided guidance to the teams as they progressed through the process of shaping their books.

We wrote our content ideas down on sticky notes and tried to arrange them in a logical order, a difficult task when so many pieces of the system are interconnected with each other. By lunchtime, when the table of contents was supposed to be finished, we still had far more chapters than could be completed by a team of five people in less than three days. The team then needed to go through the process of “killing our darlings,” dropping some desired chapters from the manual, but also leaving an opportunity for others in the community to contribute their knowledge and expertise at a later date.

Jim Keenan contributed remotely via a Google Hangout. 

Once the table of contents was completed, the next two and a half days fell into place as each of the team members wrote their chapters. They were long days, but the team worked well together, focusing on their areas of expertise while periodically asking questions of each other or even sometimes consulting the always-helpful IRC community. Our team’s strength was the diversity in skills among its members, leading to a fuller and richer manual, just as the diverse skills in the larger Evergreen community have led to a stronger ILS and vibrant support community.

With the book done, Gunner facilitated another unconference on the final day where we talked about ways to sustain the work we started at the conference.

I want to send along a final thanks to the Google Open Source Program Office for sponsoring the program, to Gunner for getting us energized, to Adam Hyde for guiding us through the book-creation process, and to all those in the community who answered our questions throughout the week.

By Kathy Lussier, Evergreen Contributor

Google is excited to support the need for good, clear documentation of free and open source software with the three projects this year as well as the four projects from last year’s successful Document Sprint.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

This article from Safari Books does a good job of explaining why this is an important methodology for the publishing industry.

“I think there are a wide variety of types of books that could benefit from the Book Sprint process. …We received expert facilitation throughout the week and without that, a Book Sprint couldn’t exist…”

http://techblog.safaribooksonline.com/2012/12/13/0-to-book-in-3-days/

There will be an initial pilot Book Sprint training program in May 2013. The initial training will be 5 full days in New Zealand and will be integrated into an ongoing mentoring program and optional master classes. More information will be forthcoming including dates, outline, and fees.

For early bird inquiries please contact adam@booksprints.net

and when I say didnt exist, I mean…no title, text, images, covers where started until Tuesday….

GSoC Doc Camp Books – Evergreen, Fontforge, Etoys as paper and electronic books (kindle, android, iPad).

On Monday Dec 3 we started the second GSoC Doc camp – bringing together 3 free software projects to hold a 2 day unconference and 3 day Book Sprint.

It was a tremendously successful event, helping to reshape how each  group understood their documentation and the role it plays in supporting and promoting free software. We settled down to the Book Sprint on day 2 (Tuesday Dec 4) with table of content generation first on the agenda. Each group worked out the ToC by the end of lunch and then immediately into writing.

The books we finished by 1900 (7pm) on the third day (Dec 6) of the sprint (Thursday) and output to electronic formats immediately. The printed books were printed by a local print on demand service and delivered the next day for the participants to take home…Zero to 3 books in 3 days…

Included below are some images of the interior of the Fontforge book.

Update on forthcoming Sprints: Book Sprints coming up for Internet Security in 1 week (San Francisco), the Open Source code repository software Google Melange (San Francisco) in Mid January, followed by the Ecocities Book Sprint in Cairo in the first week of February.

2012 GSoC Doc Camp underway

The first day of the second Doc Camp has just begun. Gathered together at the Sunnyvale Googleplex are 3 free software projects – Fontforge, Evergreen, and Squeakland. Each group has about 6 contributors that have travelled from near and far (furthest being Australia and Germany) to participate. The event is co-organised by FLOSS Manuals, Aspiration, and Google Summer of Code.

The aim is to have 3 concurrent Book Sprints (to produce 3 books in 3 days) and have a 2 day unconference. The first day is all unconference facilitated by the amazing Allen Gunn (Gunner). Discussions have focused on the development of documentation communities, how to get free software users involved in the process of making documentation better, and how to keep documentation up to date with the software.

Gunner facilitating the unconference part of the Doc Camp.

Update Day 3: All is going well with all three projects on target. We will finish most of the content tonight with the last material to be added in the morning and then clean up and editing in the afternoon. At 10PM the material is delivered to the Print on Demand service for printing and delivery on Friday.

Evergreen crew with continuous remote partipation from Jim Keenan via tablet on the far table.

Finished and released. You can find the epub, pdf and mobi files plus online html here: http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch007_getting-cleaning.html

The book builds on the Open Data Handbook previously created by the OKFN. The spending book will be used for workshops this week in Bosnia and printed as booklets to assist the participants.

This brings me to a small break in what has been a crazy amount of sprinting in the last 6 weeks. Since Oct 3 I have facilitated the production of 4 books (all except one being on non free software topics – Open Oil, Open Spending Data, and Andre Malraux, and the CryptoParty Handbook). It hardly seems possible and of course I’m exhausted and grabbing a few days to relax before moving on to Egypt at the end of the month for a Book Sprint (in Arabic and English) on mapping Cairo and its ecological hot spots, and then San Francisco to facilitate 3 simultaneous sprints (all free software topics  - Fontforge, Evergreen, and Squeakland) and one final triple sprint on Internet Security by the end of the year. That will make a grand total of 13 books (approx 400,000 – 500,000 words) all freely licensed and produced in under 11 weeks.

On top of that the 2 books sprinted in September – OER UK, and Notation Systems could be added to the tally of what looks like a growing need for Book Sprints and trained facilitators.

Update: The OKFN have had three offers to translate the book already. It is also going to be used for training in Egypt and Bosnia.

This morning a new Book Sprint started at the Center for Collaborative Creativity in Kings Cross, London. There are 7 sprinters from NGOs that work with monitoring and analysing data that governments make available. Its a pretty diverse group with one person from each continent (except Antarctica) present.

This morning we started in typical Book Sprint style with introductions and a broad discussion of what the book should be. We created post-it notes from this discussion and then grouped these on the wall. We then formed 3 groups, each to take a major theme and break it down further. Soon lunch and a presentation of the major sections of the book as determined by each group.

This Book Sprint is brought together by the Open Knowledge Foundation and facilitated by Adam Hyde.

Update Day 2: half way through day two, the book is looking good. 10,000 words and great conversations. We also have an illustrator on hand to work out some diagrams.

Update Day 4 : Final leg. 18,000 words and nice illustrations. Almost done.

Yesterday the Transmediale Book Sprint was completed and the work will be published in the forthcoming festival catalogue. 12,000 words all up of very interesting exploration of Malraux and The New Aesthetic.

While this sprint was in progress the Open Oil people had their book printed and sent it to funders and interested parties. A print run of 3000 books is also in the works after a little run through to check some formatting.

The Book Sprint was very successful in terms of both creating a book and  bringing together a community. For 5 long days we were a small community gathered together around a book, exploring it together and working out the best way to explain something that all present were passionate about – namely, contract transparency.

In addition we just got in some feedback received ‘on the wire’ about the Open Oil book which was written a week ago and released at the conclusion of the sprint. The book is intended to help increase transparency and give people an entry point to understanding ecological, legal, social issues that are effected by Oil Contracts. The following are some first wave reactions to the book (names are not included since the Oil Industry is a rather sensitive game):

“Thanks a lot for this wonderful resource. It will be so helpful for so many actors in the extractive sector around the world! Congratulations for such an important work!”

“Congratulations. Well done. Look forward to studying it.”

“Great initiative! ….and congrats for the publication of ‘Oil Contracts’.”

“Congrats! Looking fwd to reading this.”

“It was really good efforts and good job done the book is one of the best,  simple, direct books that dealing with such contracts problems”

“This email just to congratulate OpenOil for this great job!!”

Additionally, it’s been sent out through the Network for Applied Research on Oil, Gas and Mining Activities (without us asking!) and it’s also been included on the recommended books section for the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights (ENIAR) http://www.eniar.org/research/books/

Lastly some public tweets:

“Thanks a lot @Open_Oil for this wonderful e-book”
Periyaguru Durairaj, Oil and Gas Analyst

“Great initiative by @Open_Oil: “Oil Contracts- How to Read and Understand them”: http://bit.ly/UjgUcv ” from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre http://www.business-humanrights.org

#MustRead @Open_Oil‘s excellent new free e-book : How to Read and Understand #OilContracts #OpenData -
Habib M. Sayah ‏@Habsolutelyfree

Excellent initiative: @Open_Oil developing a book on oil contracts 2 improve negotiation capacity #somalia #somaliland 
oceansofopportunity ‏@Somali_Seas

RT @raekaaiyar: Want to know more about the oil industry? A simple, transparent guide:…

Read and understand Oil Contracts: great work by OpenOil: http://ow.ly/f7DEW -
Wouter Biesterbos ‏@wbiesterbos

Really great guide: Oil Contracts – How to read and understand them, by OpenOil. …#transparency
Friedrich Lindenberg ‏@pudo

Oil Contracts: How to Read and Understand them. This could be a really useful resource …
Nicholas Shaxson ‏@nickshaxson

.@openoil‘s guide to understanding oil contracts is surprisingly compelling…
Peter Bofin ‏@SwahiliStreet

and some images of the book formatted by bookjs. What is very nice about this is that Open Oil are producing their book using completely Open Source web-based tools with no proprietary desktop publishing applications in sight …and I might add – no desktop publishing experience needed…

Update Nov 24: Open oil in the press:
http://openoil.net/news-and-reports/openoil-in-the-press/

The following are links taken from the above url

Africa – Informing the People – Oil Contracts Demystified - All Africa (reposted from Think Africa Press)
Booksprint sets out to throw light on oil contracts – Oil in Uganda
Summit of Newthinking – Open Strategies – Crowdsourcingblog.de
“원유계약 – 이것들을 읽고 이해하는 방법” 무료 다운로드 – Economic View
OpenOil: Projekt für mehr Transparenz in der Öl-Industrie – Netzpolitik.org
OpenOil – Mehr Transparenz für die Bevölkerung? – Satzgrund
Oil Contracts – how to read and understand them – Loomnie
免費資源：石油合約免費教科書下載 – Taiwan Energy Policy and Law Institute
Oil Contracts: How to Read and Understand them – Tax Justice Network
Here is to a book that did not exist a week ago – “How to understand an oil contract” – creative-destruction.me

New as of November 28:
http://uhuruyamawazo.blogspot.de/2012/11/understanding-oil-contracts-special.html http://openeconomics.net/2012/11/28/introducing-openoil/ 

Today is the first full day of a very fascinating Book Sprint. We are working to produce a short text (12,000) words but also generating a theory at the same time. It’s certainly adding items to my Book Sprint toolbox. The article is to be written by four digital arts theorists and is focused on generating a text focused on the intersection of Malrauxs work on the Imaginary Museum as it intersects with the New Aesthetic.

My experience before with sprints of this nature is that you need to allow enough time for the idea to come out of the group but not enough time for the group to get stressed with the content-as-moving-target. Its a difficult balance and in this case facilitation really is about removing yourself from the process and identifying that critical point to pin the group down to a more concrete stage. It is all ‘on the fly’ of course, and I am learning a lot with each Book Sprint and learning what works and what doesn’t every time. What is fantastic about doing a sprint like this one is that you go to the outer edge and learn things that can be utilised in other sprints. Not every Book Sprint is going to also include a playful theory-jam but there will be some that need complex ideas and half formed constructions to be made concrete and the experience now will also help with those.

Each Book Sprint is an end in itself of course, and I am enjoying the very fascinating conversations. Two of the participants (David Berry and Michael Dieter) have been in a sprint before with me in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and I am also very interested in how they are more used to diving into the unknown.

Dr. David Berry making a point about the conceptual territory.

Update Day 4: It has been a very interesting Book Sprint.We started in an unusual and broken way, with several people arriving at different times. It disrupted the start and I learned a lot from this – namely, the Book Sprint process has to be instantiated in the right way. That is a very big lesson to me, to not disregard the process, no matter what the circumstances. At the beginning the right mood and expectations need to be set which is the usual way I start things. This time I did not do it because of the disruptive, staggered start – that was a mistake. We had to ‘reset’ the process 2 days later and it came right. On the other hand, what has been really great about this particular sprint is for the first time I have seen the sprint used to conjure up theory. This really has been a product of the on-the-fly remixing of thoughts through across-the-table discussions and through reading and commenting on texts as they are being produced. Its interesting to see that this has largely taken place because Michael Dieter and David Berry have been involved in a sprint before and are open and eager to do this although Baruch Gottlieb and Lioudmila Voropai soon found there way into this process.

The group at work.