 who are capable to listen to one more presentation. This is the last presentation. It's in the Devin Outreach track, and I'm happy to once again welcome Andy to the talk that he will be given. Andy is working with O'Reilly, and he has the honor of having published the first book on Linux with that publishing company. So that's amazing. That's a long time ago, if I remember. 1994, here. And he is also very much interested in the relationship between open source and the openness of governments. I'm not quite sure if that is the topic of this talk, but I'm sure you will enlighten us anyway. Okay. A plus for Andy O'Reilly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I don't want to give you a big PowerPoint extravaganza at five o'clock in the afternoon. Nobody wants to deal with that. I'm not going to overwhelm you with the statistics and stuff about floss manuals. And in fact, I just see a few segments of floss manuals, and I'm going to talk about what I know. We have one other person here, Moshon, who has done a lot with floss manuals. I invited a lot of people, and some people said they could come, and then they couldn't come, and it's too bad. I wanted to have a panel, but we'll talk about what we can talk about. This is what floss manuals looks like. And I thought it would be interesting to go over what we have. We have a little bit of sort of, I don't know what that is on the left. Here we have a big list of manuals. I believe all the manuals are here. You will notice that a lot of things are on end user tools. They don't tend to have things like GNU C compiler manual, that kind of thing. It's more like the Audacity manual, the Inkscape manual. A lot of things that are for artists and creative people, which shows you the origin of floss manual. On the right are some of the more popular or recent things, like Civi CRM is in here. I worked a lot on that one. Can't find it now. There is one big element that you see on a lot of web pages that is missing from this page. Anybody, of course, this is not so common for you in the free software community, but there is one big element, you go a lot of web pages, you see it, but it's not here. What do you think? Actually, there is a login, but you have to go to another place. You have to go to the right page, the WH. You can log in, it is a wiki, so you can log in and change it just like Wikipedia. So, well, there's another element that's missing. Anybody else wanna think of what I'm thinking of? Ads, yes, no ads. This is basically Grant supported. I don't know how the founder, Adam Hyde, can do it, but he got a grant very early in the process to set this up. He has money to pay himself to fly around the world, doing his work on this stuff, which I'll describe later. He has money for two programmers, and I don't even know if they're full-time programmers, but they're doing this great work creating a whole new look that's going to be much nicer. They call it bookie because it's like wiki, but it's more for a book. So, this is a, and there is the login here, except I'm already logged in. So, FlossManuals is free software, let's see, the slogan is free manuals for free software. And it was started by Adam Hyde, who was sort of an artist, he's an installation artist and has done some radio work. He comes from the art community, and a lot of people he got interested in this beforehand also came from the art community, and I think you can see that in a lot of things about it. You can see it in the aesthetics, which are, let's not try to do things perfectly, but let's just get something out there and see what it looks like, and you can see it as I showed you before in the list of topics. And we have wiki media commons, alchemy, WordPress, M player, and so forth. And he just got a bunch of people to start writing. The first minute, I think I'll go to my slides here. I did prepare a few slides, nothing too heavy. And the very first one they did was called Audacity. It's about the audio editing tool, and this is the old look. It's not great, but it's good enough. And there was a lot about this that was good enough. The editing interface, which I could show you, is just like what you see on a lot of blog sites when you put in comments. It has a WYSIWYG interface. You can do bold and italic, and you can do some indents, pretty simple stuff. And the way it looks is good enough. And the IRC channel, which I could show you if you like, is good enough. It's this little box where you can watch what other people are doing when you are editing, and you can have a quick exchange of comments with someone if you're both having to be online at the same time. And translations, oops, I didn't mean to do that. I meant to do the next slide. This is the Hindi version of the Audacity manual. Translations are a big part of it. They are all volunteer. Everything is volunteer except for the couple of programmers that they've hired to make the new system. Here's another manual that interests many people. This has, besides the Farsi translation, the Chinese and the Russian translation, they're doing some others. There are many sites, which I'll get to. I lied about the statistics. I did want to impress you that there's a lot of people involved. The regular users, I'm not sure what that means. I think it's better than just people with accounts because Facebook has 800 million people on their account, right? So the regular users are something. All these other things mean something. I actually think that the request change tickets, that's a very low number. That's what I saw when I looked at their bug reporting site. And 50 manuals in English. Here are some of the translation sites. As you can see, some people have actually set up entirely their sites at particular countries for their translations. Sprints is a very interesting and sort of something that came later after Floss Manual started. Adam had heard about Code Sprints and there was someone who had talked to him about the possibility of doing book sprints and he thought, well, we just get people together and have the work eight hours a day or so for five days and see what comes out. And it's been really amazing and people can do a lot. In fact, I've gone to my company, O'Reilly, and said maybe we should have people do books this way because the typical way of doing a book, I can tell you working at a publisher is you sign a contract with somebody who is already a big shot and they have a job and they're probably doing training and consulting and they may have a family and so forth and they're wrenching three or four hours a week out of their schedule and always putting things aside and making excuses to people and then making excuses to their editor because they can't get things done fast enough and it's really agony. And it might be actually better for them just to say, get the babysitter. I'm gonna take a week or two vacation from work. I'm gonna say goodbye to my family for just a week or two and go off and do it, especially if you had a few people collaborating and you could come out with a book and perhaps in that time. But one of the problems with doing that is that commercial books usually have to be a certain size. If they're under, say, 200 pages, it's not very easy to sell it and make money on it. Just the whole print aspects. It might work better with electronic books. And I tend to notice that the things produced by these sprints are anywhere from 75 pages to 150. I worked on one, the CIVI CRM manual, that was like 150 the first time around and then the second edition we got up to over 300. So it is possible to do it incrementally and make it better and better. But it's an amazing experience doing a sprint. You get in a room with people, you're chatting, you're working together. You've probably done this in another context and it's really nice to do something that's really creative like writing at a sprint. You certainly want people who know their stuff, who come in having done the research, having done the basic things they need to do already. But it's a wonderful way to build community and it creates this center for people can focus on this thing while they're doing it and afterward. This is our book. We did this. And it's something that you don't get just by working on a wiki. And I noticed that either tomorrow or the next day there's going to be some talk about the W and wiki. So wikis can be pretty neat, but it's really something to do a book and it's really amazing to do a book in a short period of time. And Mouchon did one on Collaborative Futures as you mentioned before. And I think I might have another slide somewhere. That was all I had for slides. The software I'll talk a little bit about. It is based right now on T wiki. And it's okay, as I said, it's good enough. T wiki has some limitations, I think limitations on the output, on producing a nice output with a lot of interesting CSS properties and probably some problems with the input as well. So the Adam Hyde, who as I said, is the founder of the project and a couple of the people he hired decided to throw everything out and just take Django and create a new interface from scratch, which is what they're doing. And they've got some pretty grandiose plans. Right now, all you can do is produce a PDF, which I think I have over here. This is a sample of what it looks like. We have something much better now. Unfortunately, I didn't save the screenshot of what it looks like with a really nice fonts and a much better layout. But they're trying to make it look like a really good professional book. And I think they've gotten pretty close. So you can produce a PDF and they want to be able to import lots of things, export lots of things. Do you have a question or a comment? We should get the microphone, oh, this. See whether it's on. I think the problem is that the battery's dead and so it flashes and then it stops. Okay, so I'll repeat the gist of what you say. Yeah, it's on. Thank you. You rule. Yeah, I guess. So I feel like in my life I've moved away from using technical reference books toward just when I have a problem searching for a solution. And I guess I'm wondering what you guys have thought about in terms of what users you're targeting with these books and you've gotten a few back on if they solve their problems and how you chose books as opposed to some other kind of writing to choose this. And that reminds me that I didn't tell you anything about the read, write, and remix interface, which I should do. I was rather surprised too when Adam contacted me. My own way of getting involved was that I have been very concerned about books maybe being irrelevant or not meeting everyone's needs because information moves so fast. And so I have written a bunch of articles about how experts who are normally asked to write books for publishers, experts could collaborate with people online doing wikis, even doing mailing lists and forums, try to find ways to bridge these things. So that you have the instantaneousness and the community aspects of all the benefits that has, along with the benefits of having experts who sit back and take time to think about it and put out a great statement. So I wrote some articles and Adam contacted me and asked me to be on his advisory board and then I did some volunteering and I went to a conference where I met Biela Coleman and that's how I got involved in this deviant conference and so forth. So it seems that people still want an authoritative source and there are times when they just get frustrated trying to get their information in bits and pieces. I think really you can do it for a certain amount of time and there's some people who boast about never having read a book or not reading a book about something. I think a lot of people say, I really need to get my head around at this time and say in CIVI CRM, which is one of the things I worked on, say well we can tag things just like in Facebook or dig you can tag things and there's tags and there's other things that look similar and I don't quite get the difference in when do I use one, when do I use the other and eventually they say I really want to get my head around it so a book will be useful for that. They might not read the whole 350 pages which is now the size of the CIVI CRM manual but at least it is there organized. I know the way I've read manuals, I sometimes read cover to cover which is of course the right way to do it. I want you to read the whole thing but sometimes I'm in a hurry so I'll go look for an example and I'll say oh yeah let's try this, that doesn't work so I'll back up 10 pages and see what it says about the example and try it again, that doesn't work, I'll back up another and you can do that in this book but it's nice to have a book that's well organized so even if you're reading in that kind of dyslexic way you can still get continuity and a narrative from it. So having answered that, let me talk a bit about this read-write remix. Read is just a website so you get the canonical information. I think here they solve some of the problems that you worry about with other wikis when you worry that people are gonna just, maybe with the best of intentions people are going to put in incorrect information and try to update something without really understanding it. So the read site has been validated by someone, there are certain maintainers, although we were just trying something before where I published a new version inadvertently so I suppose maybe it's not as secure as it should be. The idea is that the maintainers look at, every couple months they can look at the wiki part, see whether it's good, make sure it's good then they publish it. Now if there's new stuff that you're looking for you can go to the right part. And right means if you log in you can add stuff, you can change stuff and you can also see what other people have done and it's raw, it's more like Wikipedia where you just get what's there that's day. Remix, I'm not sure how much people are using it but it just means you can take different chapters from different manuals, the granularity is one chapter. And also for editing, the granularity is one chapter, you can't have two people editing the same chapter at the same time. But remix could be very useful say for people who want to do textbooks and want to take one thing from here, one thing from there. Yes? So one of the projects I work on is the Open AFS project which is a distributed network file system that originally began as a CMU project but it became a commercial product from Transarch which was purchased by IBM that they had an open sourced. So one of the things that's a little bit unique about it compared to a lot of open sourced projects is that we got it as an open sourced project with both not only a complete reference manual but a complete user manual written by professional documentation writers at IBM. And so one of the things about the presentation about having a website like this and having a set of manuals like this that brings to mind or the sort of combination blessing and a curse that we ran into with having this in an open source project, we have this large manual which was clearly written to a consistent style guideline with a whole set of conventions and then we have an open source project which being the open sourcing of a commercial application that had stagnated for years before it was open sourced immediately after it became open sourced changed drastically, quickly because all this pent up demand and all these pent up patches that everybody had flowed into the tree. What happened in practice was that the manual and even though it was even in the same project and these are kind of a separate website from the project became very quickly rather significantly out of date and then became extremely intimidating. And so we had this problem where how do we get back to having a well written manual when we have this sort of extremely well written but wrong manual and can you set guidelines that say that you're not allowed to change something in the source from this point on without also updating the manual and then you get into a whole bunch of questions around who you can ask to update the manual and that sort of thing. I think that's one of the things to me that's a challenge for open source manuals because open source changes. Commercial products, they release a commercial product you write a manual for that product. It's gonna change eventually but that product is a lifespan and over that lifespan it's not really gonna change very much. I know in the CIVICRM manual we deliberately decided not to try to go into great detail about which manual you use for which thing and how to do, say how to get your mail server to work with other, you know, with the spam filtering and stuff. All those details were still on the wiki and the book was more of a conceptual book. How do you think about tags as I mentioned before? How does tags compare to other things and how do you plan ahead before you put your data into CIVICRM so that you can use all these features? So that was meant to be a more stable kind of information and, you know, it gets out of date fairly quickly. That AFS situation, a very interesting one where you had a manual, I haven't read it so I don't know how good it is. You might think it's good on one level but sometimes if you try something totally different you might say, wow, we really wanted this other one. We didn't realize that we were missing so much. Oh, I mean, it's technical documentation. It's not written as a book. So it falls short of the standards of an O'Reilly book, for example, in the sense that it didn't have that kind of degree of editing for flow. But, you know, in the community it's pretty well respected. The people who have gone and tried to run AFS really liked the manual up until the point which led them off a cliff because the software had changed. You know, it's a tough situation and I think it's probably the same with code and with anything else in life. You have to decide what part you're going to keep and sometimes it's better just to start over but sometimes you can keep some part. Yeah. I mean, in a way, the situation you've described is that the manual has a dependency on some version of open AFS. And that version isn't encoded necessarily in the manual, or maybe it is, I don't know. Well, I mean, we can say, the problem is more that that's not the version that anyone runs anymore because it's the version that was originally released open source, which at this point was 10 years ago. So, you know, we're trying to do updates to the manual. It's just that one of the problems that we're running into is that if what you ask people to do is like the kind of documentation you're talking about, go to this menu to change this thing and it moves to a different menu, it's actually really easy to tell people, oh, you have to change the manual when you move the menu. That's trivial. What actually is harder is when the conceptual, is when you introduce a whole new conceptual feature to the software. Getting the person to write who's writing the software to also write the manual entry is actually quite hard. That's the problem we've more run into. I have a little trite answer for you, which is to run a bookspread. It seems like you've just got to solve it if you're going to have it solved. And after Karl talks, I'd like to put Mushon on because he has so much that he could say about fonts and design and bookie, new bookie stuff. Oh, I better get my question in then. Okay. There's no chance going next. This is sort of a technical question. There are a lot of free books out there already in freely licensed and in free-ish formats. I'm thinking of one in particular that you edited. And is there a way to import those into Floss Manual so that they can become part of that editing environment in sort of joining the Floss Manuals community, even though they were not written in a bookspread? Well, that's part of the grandiose plans to have a lot of import and export. And Docbook, which producing open source software is in is one of the things it's planned for, but it's kind of, it's a big job. So I think first they're trying to get the new software just working, have a nice interface, have a nice output PDF look. And I think that the other things are on the way. So, okay, why don't you talk about that then? Can I respond to that? I'm done, sir. Okay. So when we worked on Collaborative Futures, the Collaborative Futures is a bit of a different challenge because Collaborative Futures was not a manual. It was, we were invited by, Floss Manuals was invited by the Transmediale Art Festival in Berlin to write a book about the future of collaboration. And we didn't know anything about what this book would be other than the two words Collaborative Futures. And it's not a manual book. So there's not like, like in the case of the, that I've just talked about with design, it's not like there's this object that we respond to. There's more like different people thinking about different things and responding to it. Now it was the first time we, bookie was used, it was like pre-alpha basically. It was crashing all the time and everything as you would expect. But the nice thing is that it's all, like the syntax is all HTML. So it's a, it's a smart kind of whiz-weak editor. So every time bookie would crash, we would just revert to some other editor. I worked on a WordPress editor and just copy pasted it directly into bookie and everything worked. So again, a matter of open standard and the open standard is HTML. Do you want me to actually show bookie? That would be nice, yeah. I'll look at, can you do it here? Do you want to pull up there? Yeah, yeah, I can do it on your computer. All right. And as we're doing that, I'll just respond to your question about. What should I pull up? About Emmanuel, I agree with you. If I have a bug or something, I'm searching for it online and I rarely come, I get a response of a book. It's usually a blog post. But what is happening with these books is that the fact that it is a centralized artifact, which is kind of the opposite of many of the things that we're doing, it's like this conference. This conference is a centralized artifact. Yeah, so people get excited about being a part of this. The same way that people get excited about writing a book, because we come together, we work together, and we come up with a product. And that product is like, we wouldn't have invested so much time and so much focus collaboration on writing a manual. That manual is available as HTML online and it has been thought about by different people. And that's basically, a book is a good excuse for collaboration. And I think that's one of the great strengths of Floss Manuals. This doesn't bode well. I don't know whether we should blame the Columbia Network or the bookie site for the long loading. So, yeah, oh, so it's just loaded. I pressed on this. This is the core components of that's what you wanted. So let's just try. Yeah, sorry. Now, I should mention, of course, that a lot of products are funded. I believe, who funded the Collaborative Futures Well, the Transmediale Festival funded the Collaborative Futures. The first Collaborative Futures, Sprint, and then the second one was funded by, the second Sprint was funded, sorry about your Facebook here. Oh, it's down. Yeah, I think it's actually going through an upgrade right now. Okay. So we won't be able to show you that. But the point is that for the case of, I'm really interested, my background is in design and I've been doing print design much before I've been doing web design and much, I guess, before there was web design. And to be able to control the book through the same language that I control CSS and to collaborate around that is awesome. And the book is designed with CSS and actually at the moment, Floss Manuals is trying to contribute back to Firefox to implement CSS three standards that are not implemented yet that are about printing because Floss Manuals is in the cutting edge of using web technology for print. Are you saying that the PDF style is encoded using CSS? The CSS, yeah, it outputs PDF, it outputs the EPUB, it outputs HTML. So everything that is written for the book is also available as HTML and is searchable and so on. And then, again, it's an excuse to create the content. The book as itself, it's great to have on, it's great to hold, but even if you're actually, if you actually have the book, you can search it. You can still search it online and then, oh, it's down there in this chapter. Oh, it's going fine. It's going fine. Thanks, so it's sort of the $64,000 question. Do we have any stats or data about the number and demographics of people who are reading the manuals? Well, except for that, Adam said the brief message saying he has 2,200 regular users and I don't know what that means. It would be great to get downloads. I think someone asked me earlier today, suppose you wrote a book and you'd like to know how many people downloaded it. Yes, they should be giving you that information. I haven't seen anything like that, except once in a while, someone will say, hey, somebody wrote this great blog or we got on Slashdot or something and we had a spike in usage, but we should be reporting this more regularly. I like that. Yeah, it would be really useful. On my laptop, which I'm gonna get to real soon now, but it's in a gift repository on my laptop right now is a project I'm thinking of called DebianTFM because they always say RTFM, but there isn't really an F-ing M for Debian. So this is something it was gonna be, it's all in doc book, GPL'd, and it was gonna be like one of the typical operating system level. You're certainly a trooper to be doing it in doc book. Operating system type books that you see in Barnes and Nobles or Borders. But my thing is that I don't really need help with the writing, but the other aspects of producing a book, the design, the editing, and so on. That's not skills that I really have. So is that something that Floss Manuals could help with? As far as I know, well, certainly editing is done in various ways. I'm a professional editor. So I've donated some time and I've been paid for some of my time to work on some of these things. So I'm talking about commerce, semicolons, and things. Well, more than that, developmental stuff. There are people who will go through, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have as good a command as they think they do of good English syntax, whether it's British English or American English. But there are people who will go through and they'll do a pretty good job. I said everything about Floss Manuals is pretty good or good enough. So yes, there are people who will do that. And as for design, I guess we basically have a standard design, right? And the standard design can change, but I don't think you would probably tweak too many elements of it. You would probably use the same design as the other books, I think. Okay. And because it's the third one, don't you think? Well, actually, I did want to ask one more like follow-up to that is also, could you comment on getting Floss Manuals from whatever source into bookstores? Because I think that's violent because a lot of people can read stuff online, but there's a lot of people who don't. Yeah, I ask O'Reilly how to get books into bookstores, that can be hard enough. You go to the bookstores. Well, I believe that Floss Manuals could, I don't think they have any connection with the booksellers like Amazon.com now, but they certainly can put ISBNs on books. Do we have ISBNs now? Yeah, so getting an ISBN is really easy, and it's cheap, it's like $25. And we actually, it was cheap enough for us to get different ISBNs for the two different collaborative futures editions, even though there were only five months between them. But, and then you can actually get it on Amazon as well. So when you have an ISBN number, you can put your book on Amazon. There's a bit of a process for that, but it's completely doable. Now you can also put it on lulu.com or other print-on-demand bookstores. So if you're thinking about supporting the production, the way print-on-demand works and the way lulu works, they say it would cost you, let's say $8 to print a single book. And then if you wanna pay, if you wanna sell it for $12, you'll get $4 from that. And it still follows all of the principles of free software in that sense. So I think that that can be another incentive and another set of properties for collaboration in that sense. I did go into lulu, and my concern is the same with having stuff online. It was working. The people who know can get to the information, but I think a big audience nowadays for computer books is people who are just casual computer users. And the first thing they do is go down to their local borders or Barnes and Nobles and look at what's on the shelves over there. And they'll see like maybe 20 Fedora books, 20 Ubuntu books, but maybe like one full-on copy of like Martin Craft's Debian book from like three years ago. So if we really wanna get books, if we wanna get information on Debian out there, we need to get it into the bookstores as well. Along those lines, I mean, I agree with you that it'd be really good to have people be able to stumble across this information when they walk into a bookstore. But a different thing we could do is on project websites, like the Audacity website, there could be a big button that says like, so there's a documentation tab on the website. And there's just this enormous button that says click and we'll take $25 and give you a book. And like to tie it to software acquisition, especially for Windows users who don't install these things from app. Let me see where the CivvCRM did that because they are very proud of that book while we're talking. My question is for you. You said that you have export functionality for the books. Can you export currently in Floss Manuals to anything besides PDF? Because when we tried it, we were only able to get to PDFs. Can you do DocBook? Can you do HTML dumps with Floss Manuals that exist now? Or do you have, you can? Oh, by the way, CivvCRM does play up the book. You're running a lot today. The free book. Basically, you can with Bookie. Bookie exports to multiple formats. Bookie.cc does exist. It is, I think, it's public and it's usable already. Again, we used Bookie in its pre-alpha version. I would say it's kind of better right now. And it's, unlike in the first, in the first sprint where it was really crushing all the time, this time we actually used it. It has IRC built in. So we're chatting about the book in real time and we're consulting about it. Like if you go and read the Collaborative Futures book, you'll actually see samples of our conversations because basically we were also researching ourselves through the writing of the book. So yeah, it is usable. You can export it to multiple versions. It's still in a lot of development right now and there's still a lot of bugs but they are being crushed on a daily basis. Yeah, I think it's of Javi.flossmanuals. But Flossmanuals is being imported completely to Bookie. So I would say I don't want to put a deadline but it is being worked on right now and the reason we can't access Bookie.cc is because right now they're doing a major upgrade. Hi, I'm Maxi. Could you please put a big page with the URL of the site that you're mentioning? The Bookie one? Yeah. Bookie.cc, which is... Yeah, well one gets in the video and no spelling errors and so... It's too small for the video. Thanks. Okay, let's try that. All right. Let's see. B-O-O-K-I-DOT-C-C, so. Oh yeah. Woo! Hi, I was just wondering if you have any facilities now or plans in the future for some sort of workflow between programmers and writers. I was just thinking of the question here from AFS. It sounds like one of the problems that he's facing is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, you don't have any professional writers on your staff, right? And a lot of programmers are not good writers or don't like to write. And if the leap is straight from coders and now I'm gonna write a book, you maybe have a much larger leap than coders writing some sort of intermediate or using some sort of tool to prepare the, to provide the basic information for a collaboration with the writer. Is it, do you have any plans or ideas about how that part of the process goes on to bring the, for things that are about a program, an application for instance, to bring the programmers into the writing process if they don't feel comfortable doing it themselves? That, I'm gonna take that to a higher, a more meta level. There is an attitude in Floss Manuals of let's just throw things together and see what happens. Certainly we want the programmers on a project to be involved, to do the writing or be available, pretty much like a standard tech review sort of thing. But I don't think we have too many workflows, too many processes. Adam is really kind of against that. He wants people to just sort of do, there are people who come along saying, let's do a big style guide and make everybody conform. And he comes, one of the few times that he came down really hard and insisted on his way of doing things was to say I don't want people to insist on their way of doing things. And he says it's okay to write style guides and people can look at them, but we don't enforce it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'd like to have an organized way for developers. I wasn't thinking so much of having an organized way for it, but people can't work in a vacuum. So suggestions or if there is, even if you don't have a set of style guides for it, is there some sort of intermediate form between the comments and the book that the programmers then could, in their unstructured way or structured way, produce to prepare for your process. I mean, to prepare for. So they could use something like the web program that Donald Canute designed or something like Java Doc or PyDoc and then take the comments. I can respond to that as well. Okay. So one thing that is being worked on is a book for facilitating book sprints. And so it's going super meta. So the, and the facilitator, like I was a facilitator on the second collaborative futures sprint and Adam was the facilitator on the first one. And the facilitator has a very important role as much as the horizontal and collaborative, blah, blah, blah, it might be. There are some best practices and best practices that are based on the floss manuals experience. But another thing that happened is the point where I really agree with Adam about let's just get something out there is that it's much easier to make something better when there's something to make better. And what happened with, again, what happened with collaborative futures is that the first book started from two words. We didn't have a software to respond to. And the responses for the first edition was really good. But the second edition, when the new authors came in the room, they were saying like, we're not here to edit it and kind of fix typos and stuff. We're here to actually respond to a body of work that has been gathered. And we actually have a lot of problems with this body of work. And collaborative futures not being a manual is actually, there's a lot of conceptual and ideological gaps between the different authors. But the second that the authors could respond to an existing book, then the level of progress was much faster. So you need to get something down there and then you can improve on it. I can make some philosophical statements about programming and documentation. The programmers should definitely be working very closely with people who do documentation. Just as in your own talk, we've shown you said that programmers and designers should work closely together. Now, when I was working on the CVCR manual, I was editing, going along, and I keep reading something that says, you have to have a profile to do this. So if you have not created a profile, go do that and come back. And this is happening over and over again. All these things depend on profiles. You always have to go through the profile first and come back. And I finally wrote to them and said, have you thought of making a design change so that you can just press a button and it takes you to the profile page right there. You don't have to interrupt your flow. And they said, yes, we're thinking about that. So design, documentation and design really do go together. Programmers should be thinking about the people they're programming for all the time. That affects design, that affects documentation. And as to doing, and I know you would like to have better workflows and better ways to organize that, but that's pretty hard to organize. Yeah, I just had a question going back to what you were saying earlier about design. Last year I did have an opportunity to write a book, become one author on a book. We only had six weeks. So we worked on it eight hours a day, more likely 12 hours a day for six weeks. So you have this idea where work on the book, you're in almost like a lot tech interface where you're just dumping information. Then you want some style applied to it and then read not only your chapter but other people's chapters because what was happening was someone would write something and then everyone else would go, oh, I'm gonna keep it and that flow is good for me. Oh, you're kind of not the same information but the same layout. So is there any way in this to keep that style kind of locked to allow the, just so that I can sit there and type in the information in a tech kind of way and give you the hints, but then magic happens on the back end. I can look at the printed page or what would be a representation of the printed page. Do you want to answer to that? Because basically. If it's about design, you'd better. If you're talking about design as in, do you mean design as in graphic design? Okay, yeah. Completely. I don't want to deal with that. You don't. And that's actually one of the strengths of Bookie. I've been designing books with kind of the leading proprietary software in the field which is InDesign. Now InDesign is really based on, is trying to basically mimic CSS. It's trying to, like you can select text and say this is the type of text. It's like a class. You can say this is a heading. Like it's really based on the idea of CSS and then it's actually much easier to manipulate the content in Bookie than it is in InDesign. No matter how advanced the software is and it is, you know, Bookie is not there yet. But they inherit advantages of the separation of content and presentation. That is what HTML and CSS are doing. It is really great. Like I have been, when I'm designing, when I'm working on the design for collaborative futures I'm actually even using CSS3 kind of selectors to actually break the fourth paragraph because it happened to be longer than the others. Like I can really do a lot of manipulation through the power of CSS. So yeah. In- So you're going to hand to the backend publisher? Yeah. First of all, you can export from Bookie, you can export a large array of sizes. But in general, because the content itself is HTML and what Objavi does, Objavi is the engine that transforms the content into a PDF or an EPUB. It basically manipulates this HTML and it's actually using the, right now it's using WebKit to actually render the book and we're contemplating moving to Gekko, the same engine for Firefox if we get to implement some CSS selectors into it. I just had a very quick question. Is XSL a dead end now in your opinion? Well, I think it is because if HTML can be as, or even closely as selectable as XSL, then we have a format that is much more adopted and much more readable because XSL is a nightmare to read and this is about reading. I think the investment in HTML and in web technology for writing books is the right way to go, especially since one of the exports of the book is a web page. I think we have to wrap up. I would like to take sort of speaker's privilege to talk about one quick thing that's totally different. I have this thing called Blue Hacker, Blue Hacker.org. I don't know if you've seen this before. It was given to me by one of my authors. One of my authors went through a terrible period of depression and nearly dropped out of working on a book and he got involved in this organization, BlueHacker.org. When he talked to me, I said, well, I have family members who have dealt with depression. He said there's a lot of people who deal with depression and it's hard to talk about it. One of those things that can be biologically based but it's still hard to admit. So I wonder if you feel comfortable. How many people here have dealt with depression or have close friends or family members? Could you raise your hand if you can talk about that? So if you would like to be part of this movement, just to make people feel better, feel like there's other people who suffer with that, you can get one of these Blue Hacker stickers and when you go to a conference and speak like I'm doing, you can bring it up and we'll create a little movement around that. That's all I wanted to say about that. Thank you.