The FMF works with each language community to bring together people to produce free documentation about Free Software. Our 2 key strategies for this are Book Sprints (which are very well established) and a new program of Sprint Conferences which is a major new area of development for us coming into 2012.

Book Sprints

A Book Sprint is a facilitated process that brings together a group of people to produce a book in 3-5 days (although it has been done in shorter time). Usually there is no pre-production and the group is guided by a facilitator from zero to published book. The books produced are high quality content and are made available immediately at the end of the sprint in printed (using print-on-demand services) and e-book formats. Books sprints produce great books and they are a great community and team building process.

How to bypass Internet censorship? - Booksprint from howtobypassinternetcensorship on Vimeo.

FLOSS Manuals has established the Book Sprint methodology as a productive and effective means to produce high quality software manuals and other books, such as CiviCRM, How to Bypass Internet Censorship and many others.

Sprint Cons

FLOSS Manuals and Aspiration (http://aspirationtech.org) gave birth to the Sprint Conferences, with the the first taking place at the Google headquarters from Oct 17-21 2011. Four books about Free Software projects were created simultaneously by four Book Sprint teams. This event was coupled with an unconference facilitated by Aspiration.

FLOSS Manuals has always been known for its astonishing high output ratio, pioneering Book Sprints and other methods to break content production speed barriers established by traditional content production methods. Sprint Conferences are the next step forward in this area - tying in parallel sprint processes to produce 4 or 5 times the material of a single Book Sprint in the same amount of time.