Welcome to BookSprint.info

Some time in the summer of 2005 I had the most important epiphany of my professional career. The end result was this book: Wireless Networking in the Developing World. But more important to me than the actual book (which was pretty cool, and very important), was the model through which it was written. Based on the idea of a code sprint, and a result of constraints on my time, and the time of every smart person I knew, the model was called Book Sprint. The thinking went something like this:

I knew, after 5 years of teaching wireless in the developing world, and numerous attempts at producing training materials on the topic, that the topic needed a book, almost as much as I needed a book to replace the far-too-frequent workshops requiring me to travel halfway across the world. No more “reusable” powerpoint decks, train-the-trainer-training-materials or other such schemes. A good old-fashioned book, a coherent block of information aimed at getting people started with wireless networking, and targetted squarely at those places where such information was hardest to get, namely the developing world. Oh, and a chunk of text that would preferably (and unlike a wiki) remain stable enough over time that translating it into peoples native languages became feasible. And I shouldn’t forget that unlike almost everything that had already been published in the field, i knew in my heart that this had to be published under a free license, with no limitations on use, especially not on commercial use. Because i wanted people to be able to translate the book, sell the translated copies to reclaim their outlay and not be in violation of the license. Distribution was and is far more important than protecting my rights.

I also knew that there was no way i was going to be able to spend all my evenings for a year writing such a boo even if i wanted to. Which i didn’t. And i had a feeling that while i’d collected a network of incredibly smart people, with boundless experience in this field, everyone else felt mostly the same as me when it came to evenings and years. But I also knew that i could convince almost anyone of these incredibly smart people to give away a week of their time to such as good cause. So there were the constraints. Have: One week of time each from a bunch of smart people. Need: Finished book.

Solution: The Book Sprint

So I found enough funding to pay for a stack of plane tickets, and to pay some friends of friends to go on vacation so we could promptly squat in their flat. And in September 2005 I gathered some of these smart people for a week, during our annual wireless meeting (which happened to be named WSFII and be held at the Limehouse Town Hall in London that year), and we talked.

Honestly, at the time, i couldn’t even dream of being able to write a book in a week, so the original plan was to flesh out all the details, the outline, the scope and the content of each chapter, then hand out assignments go home. Then, hopefully, everyone would finish their assignments within a month or so, and we could assemble a book from it. We more or less did exactly that. Thanks to a monstrous effort from especially the books editor Rob Flickenger, we actually managed to get a first edition out the door within 3 months or so. Professionally edited, laid out and illustrated, and frankly it was and is an amazing resource.

Since that fateful week the book has been released in a 2nd and 3rd edition and translated into 6 languages. Oh, and it’s been downloaded more times than i care to understand why. At least half a million times across all languages. Amazing.

Well, I pretty much pulled out of this adventure after the 1st edition. Reality got the better of me, and I ended up with a series of different jobs that weren’t half as exciting as publishing books, but paid a hell of a lot more. But ever since that week, I’ve been watching WNDW be released in ever newer editions, come out in more and more languages, and beat every single wildly optimistic estimate for how many people would actually download such a book. And I’ve been thinking and thinking about sustainable models for using the Book Sprint model to produce more books. For more people.

And part way through that journey, last december (2007) I met Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals (http://flossmanuals.net/) at an event in Zagreb. He built and manages a pretty cool website, focused on producing documentation for Free and Open Source Software. It’s a platform for collaborative authoring and publishing. So I told Adam about the Book Sprint (well I told everyone at the event in zagreb, since that was why i’d been invited), and with his experience building tools and producing documentation, he immediately understood the idea. And improved it.

In the 10 months or so that have passed, Adam and the FLOSS Manuals team have used the Book Sprint model in a more radical form to produce excellent documentation for Inkscape, and for the Sugar User Interface of the One Laptop Per Child System.

So while Adam and I kept in touch about these things, he had his projects, and i had mine, and since my angle is Technology for the Developing World and his is Documentation fro Free Software, our main overlap was the Book Sprint model and what it meant to both of us.

Well, last week, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Adam on a Book that overlaps our areas of interest. FLOSS Manuals and Adam were running project to write a book on Bypassing Internet Censorship, and between october 9th and october 15th I had the distinct pleasure of being one cog in the wheel of 8 people that produced this, and this.

Using the excellent tools that FLOSS Manuals provide, Adam has managed to speed up the process and go from nothing to finished, published and printable book in 1 week. Extreme Book Sprinting. And it works.

There’s no doubt that WNDW is, in many ways, a better book, i.e. better editing, more consistency and better production. But Bypassing Internet Censorship shows the other end of the scale. And in many ways fulfills the original idea. How do i take a team of incredibly smart people who have volunteered a week of time each and turn that into a book?

I still think there’s room for professional editing, layout and illustration. And room for more thorough review of the material. But it depends on the project. And with FLOSS Manuals tools in the mix the choice is there. Produce a book in one week flat, or take some extra time and funding and still spend only a week of the authors time, but produce a more rounded book that can compete comfortably with books from professional tech publishers.

in any case, this last weeks experience has reinforced in me how powerful the Book Sprint model is, and how badly i want to be involved in taking it further. Adam and I will keep talking about future collaboration, and I’m excited about that. But in the meantime, we’ve setup shop here, and encourage anyone with an interest in booksprinting, tech documentation or books on technology for the developing world, to join the mailing list, and help us figure out what book sprinting should be. Or, if you’ve had any experiences with book sprints, please ask for a login, and share your case studies or just links to, and descriptions of books.

cheers

Tomas
Proud co-inventor of the Book Sprint