Workshops & BoFs/2011/Booki as a collaborative tool for creating documentation

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This is a workshop for the DesktopSummit 2011

This is an ad-hoc session, meaning that the host is responsible for scheduling it. See Workshops & BoFs webpage for more information.

Title

Use Booki to collaboratively create documentation

Description

Booki is an online tool developed by FLOSS Manuals (http://en.flossmanuals.net) for collaborative book creation. Booki users are able to create a book from scratch, import a book from another booki installation, from archive.org and from wikibooks. Once in Booki the book can be edited, have chapters and sections added to it and even have chapters from other Booki books copied into it. This creation can come from one to many users and Booki contains features that help these contributors communicate with each other including real-time chatting and instant messaging features. Once a book is created and ready to be shared with the world, Booki's export feature allows you to publish your book to a variety of formats including: book formatted PDF ready for sending to a printing press; newspaper formatted PDF for printing to news print; web PDF for online viewing, EPUB, formatted HTML and even the ODF open document format for compatibility with wordprocessors. A book's style is set at the time of publishing using CSS so a single book can be published in a variety of styles depending on the intended audience. Booki also provides a translation interface for translating an existing book from one language to another. One of the major reasons for developing Booki was to create a tool for use in Book Sprints, a process where a group of people come together (either in a physical location or remotely) with the aim of producing a book in two to five days. This is a process that FLOSS manuals have used many times to create manuals and previous book creation tools that were used weren't up to the rigours of a Book Sprint helping to prompt the development of Booki.

Hosts

The people responsible for hosting this session.

Adam Hyde Founder of FLOSS Manuals & Book Sprint Facilitator mobile :+ 49 177 4935122 email: adam@flossmanuals.net identi.ca : @eset booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam

Format

Workshop

Time and Place

When and where will this session take place? Note that you as a host is responsible for scheduling the session. A way to do this will be provided around July 20th.

Participants

Adam Hyde

See Booki in action: Two of the most active installations of Booki are listed below. http://www.booki.cc http://www.booki.flossmanuals.net, published versions of the books created here are found in http://en.flossmanuals.net. Books can be previewd without creating an account, but to fully explore Booki's features, sign up and have a play.