Open source publishing and possible futures
:::: draft format for journal article.
Abstract
There are a number of Open Source
Publishing networks and communities which facilitate the use of helpful tools
for free publishing that can be adapted for various uses or goals. However many
of these groups do not consciously take into account all of the processes
necessary to solve all problems. The ecologies of many of these networks tend
to fetishize the digital and neglect
other possible solutions. This article uses the example of a printed community wall
newspaper to argue for the value of the printed form as community-making.
Situated in Dunedin, a small city
with strong community networks, I work collaboratively with artists and other designers,
businesses and institutions, as a supporter of node gateways to new media open
methods, resources and tools. This practice extends and bridges to national and
international networks, including the non-profit group FLOSS Manuals and its
agile book creation process.
I came to work with FLOSS Manuals
through my involvement within a tiny, inwardly focussed Dunedin subcultural
community, and the handful of individuals who, spore-like, travelled far and
cross-pollinated with similar communities in Europe and further.
Free print media : a subcultural example
My experiences with open publishing
began with the weekly student magazine Critic,
when I worked at OUSA in 1991-2. I enjoyed the reach afforded by
freely-available publications; that they can be ‘found’, picked up, handed on,
archived, redistributed, passed on, lost, and found again.
In Dunedin, 1996, Caroline McCaw,
myself and others, published the first issue of weekly entertainment guide f*INK. The ,f*INK guide was an A3
sheet publication folded down to A6 size, and printed with one spot colour—black.
The written and image content was humorous, at times irreverent, and played on
the notion of the ‘dérive’ (Debord:
1958).
f*INK
was freely distributed in cafes, bars, libraries, museums, anywhere copies
could be easily picked up, read, replaced, or carried away. The widespread use
of this small publication both recognised and formed multiple connections within a small community.
We considered starting a similar publication elsewhere, but our real strength
was understanding and connecting local people with local culture. Our motto
was, “making good connections.” Without an understanding of what constituted a community
external to our experience, it seemed pointless to attempt the same in another
town.
The idea of connecting people within
the Dunedin community to cultural events was inspired by the independent
production of rock and pop music band posters in Dunedin in the early 1980s. Advertising
in Dunedin’s main newspaper, the Otago
Daily Times, was too expensive nor did it conform to or even condone the
visual styles that were evolving in bands’ artworks. Posters on walls
publicised events, and anyone who was interested then told others. Over time,
these wall posters created a panoramic view of community activity. The methods
of production of the posters were almost always manual and analogue, including
hand-drawn text, and multiple copies were made using screen-printing or
electronic photocopying.
f*INK
worked as a moveable collection of wall posters. Its design was based on
the easily recognised visual flavour of wall posters. It listed weekly events
and cultural happenings including bands, theatre, films, poetry readings,
festivals, gallery openings and special events. Up until 1996[I1] , you could find nothing
else printed in Dunedin where all these events were listed, whereas from 2010
onwards there are many event listings guides and websites with reviews and
discussion available in print and online[I2] .
It’s interesting to see the continuing value of the printed event guide.
In retrospect, f*INK worked to create an ecology of events listed in local media
for, and by, the community. It fostered a culture of event organisers telling
media about their events; as well as a developing culture of readers (and
advertisers) looking for events to attend.
In another sense, f*INK transcribed the landscape,
plotting the points of intersection between people and events. Limited by the space
of an A3 paper sheet, the design team realised that another publication was
required to visually map locations of venues, galleries and theatres, and so
began production of small maps of the inner city area, again A3 paper sheets folded
to A6 and double-sided, and free to give away. By the mid 2000s, f*INK had given away more than a million
free guides and maps.
The f*INK weekly guide encouraged new forms of collaboration on the
subcultural fringes, from tacit social collaboration in and between music and
arts networks, to submitted artworks, writings and cartoons by interested
collaborators.
That f*INK was on the cultural fringe was part of its aim and also its
success. Although based on a sustainable business model, it was experimental in
its approach, mixing media sources and processes to create a hybrid medium. For
much of the time that f*INK was
produced, the method of production was paper paste-up, formatted for offset
printing. This process allowed for additional analogue work after the digital
process. Drawing, colouring in, and glued-on found graphics were added to the
laser-printed pages to create texture and depth. The first f*INK maps were hand-drawn in a cartoon style by illustrator Stefan
Neville, with digital typography added for street names and place names. These
digital and analogue processes were woven into the production.
The landscape described so far does
not resemble or fit into traditional publishing models. Instead, it resembles
what Matthew Fuller describes as “media ecologies”, systems ‘allow for dynamic
relationships between parts and processes, often in response to a perceived
lack within a community[I3] .[1]’
For Fuller, for example, pirate
radio emerged in the context of people’s desire for fringe cultural expression
and for multiplicities emerging from ‘multiple networks of production, multiple
locations … multiple media forms … sustained by scenes and rhyzomatic drives
that refuse to give in[I4] ’
(Fuller, 2005: 52). Media
ecologies are quite well presented by Fuller as artistic/activist practices
that perform new engagements.
But how to do
it? : Free software
Whether or not one has a community, such informal and
quickly responsive publications depend on readily accessible and manageable
programmes.
From the early 1980s the use and promotion of free software was
of the kind typified by the development and distribution of Richard Stallman’s
release of the GNU compiler, the best compiler on Unix systems at the time.
However, there were more software developers willing to volunteer their time
than there were technical writers and so .there was little or no supportive
documentation .
It was not until Adam Hyde’s 2006 development of FLOSS Manuals
that readily accessible and readable documentation became available[i].
FLOSS stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software: essentially ‘free manuals for
free software’. These manuals can be obtained freely from the FLOSS Manuals
website[ii][I5] (en.flossmanuals.net is a
good starting place), or printed and purchased as single or more copies at the print-on-demand
website lulu.com[I6] .
FLOSS Manuals is an ecology of individuals, with few rules.
A community of writers produce, primarily, a repository of work. Across the
board, there’s a range of viscosity evident in a survey of collaborative
networks, from loose to rigid, with things kept open.. Their approach
facilitates collaborative knowledge production, encouraging participation rather than regulating content.
The initiator Adam Hyde, began as a digital artist. Support
materials for his projects became manuals and then a platform . [2]
FLOSS Manuals are written with a
totally open, do-what-you-want-to-it license, giving writers the freedom to improve and update the
manuals as new software versions are released. Manuals are written
collaboratively inviting alterations and improvements from readers and users.
The most up-to-date version of the manual is available in several formats,
including printed book, ePub, HTML, and Open Office. Books are available from
lulu.com as singly printed and bound editions.
I would argue that printed matter
retains its value as a form. Early uses of the Internet (the web, the digital)
did not seem to work for our community level event promotion as successfully as
print. Although the Internet is free, it did not function as well as finding, or
picking up, a printed copy of a gig guide or community newspaper or map. When free
community newspapers, maps and guides are distributed in places where locals
and visitors alike might stumble upon printed copies, they become social
intersections.
Adam Hyde has claimed in 2009 that,
“books are becoming dematerialized,
unbound ... The model is changing and now publishers should think about who
wants a book and what the demand is like. It will change to more of a print on
demand model, where one pays for the entire production of a book and brings it
into existence when wanted. This is also the issue of editions: publishers
always tend to think through editions, but Floss is a fluid entity in which
there is no canonical edition and you can re-edit everything.”[3][I7]
Online and e-books
FLOSS Manuals writes and develops freely
available online books.
The idea of the paper book has not
disappeared entirely from this platform. Diverse print formats are encouraged,
including magazine and newspaper formats. Some FLOSS Manuals are available for
sale at Lulu.com, a print-on-demand provider. Costs are kept low by printing black
ink only on white paper, saving on the much higher cost of colour printing. The
manuals are perfect-bound in a laminated colour card cover.
The various software manuals on
FLOSS Manuals include both technical and social realms, from video and audio
editing, HTML and 3D, and they extend to include community tools (such as
CiviCRM) and the documentation of methodologies to encourage an open web (such
as how to bypass internet censorship) and the maintenance of free cultures and networks[I8] .
The number of software projects being documented in ‘user manual’ form has been
steadily increasing since FLOSS Manuals
first began, so FLOSS Manuals is
becoming known as a book-form archive of how-to’s, in marked difference to
knowledge wikis such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia functions as an online
encyclopaedia, a giant global book that would be unwieldy to publish in
physical volumes. FLOSS Manuals content, on the other hand, can be individually
published as book volumes. FLOSS Manuals articles and chapters do not require
constant updating, so function well in book form.
Booki
Booki, also generated by Floss Manuals,
is the next step in the development of collaborative writing. If FLOSS Manuals is the
platform for development of software and technology resources and writings, Booki.cc
is a platform where users can write texts on any subject they choose. Adam Hyde
is enthusiastic about writers generating diverse content. “We hope to push it
outside of a particular realm and to eventually have students producing their
own textbooks.”[4] There
is a great opportunity here to use these collaborative writing tools in
education.
Book design is now in the hands of
the writers. “With Booki.cc anyone can apply their own style to the content
using CSS. So both layout and content are up to you. There is also a standard
layout that one can use,” says Adam Hyde. Booki makes an intervention in the
publishing field by allowing contributors to re-edit and re-write a book, style
the typography, the page layout, columns, margins and colours.
Book sprints
Booki and FLOSS Manuals both work
at a community level to encourage collaboration from writers. Adam Hyde has championed a
new collaborative methodology for creating books in 2-5 days—the Book Sprint.
This collaborative writing process has been used in the creation of over 30
free software manuals to date.
Booksprints[I9] are an idea developed by
Thomas Cragg and a group called Wireless Networks. Cragg and his team wanted to
publish without the constraint of traditional publishing methods, by turning it
into a social process, within a compact the time frame. They spent nearly two
months online, collaborating by exchanging texts and documents, and then met at
a physical location, wrote together, and afterwards spent a couple of months
online tidying up the writing. Adam Hyde saw the power of the booksprint for
building a community platform.
The first FLOSS Manuals book, How to Bypass Internet Censorship, an
activist handbook, used the booksprint model to produce it: several people
working on the same book at the same time to produce a book within five days.
This book has subsequently been translated into multiple languages: Russian,
English, Burmese and Arabic.
What are the by-products of this rapid collaborative process?
The booksprint creates a social event, where the technology is an enabler of
the social component. Shared
face-to-face participation creates the energy and impetus to finish a
book; that includes editing, proofing, checking images, and checking relevancy.
Remote collaborations are also effective, but
not as effective as the face-to-face booksprint[I10] .
As the current publishing world moves toward distributed digitalised social
frameworks and digital online outputs, FLOSS Manuals is moving in the opposite
direction, towards face-to-face social
processes and printed, physical outputs, in book, magazine and newspaper form,
as well as online ‘books’.
The point here is not whether a book is physically
manufactured in the end, but rather that it is a source of knowledge production:
booksprints carry much more weight and power than ‘pdf-sprints’ for instance.
The book is a powerful cultural artefact;its physicality retains meaning.
Collaboration : a book is a community
Around FLOSS Manuals a sort of corpus is
created: the workshops that we facilitate provide energy to the public, they
then become empowered and put lots into the network. It’s a sort of back and
forth nature, where one thing fuels the other. Community is an important aspect
for motivation. We are sort of a community within a community. It is a question
of identification. A book is a community. Booksprints form this community. The
book is a powerful central focus for a community to build around.[5]
While cloud computing and crowd
sourcing are new developments in network technology, FLOSS manuals ismoving
against the tend toward cloud storage.. While
cloud is about automatically getting content, FLOSS Manuals facilitate book production
through participation, with a necessary hierarchy. “Online communities are not
organised as democracies.” (Contributors, 2010)
Regarding authorship, some writers mightcollaborate on a
single production of a book and then decide to assume ownership. Or some
writers may prefer to only contribute to parts of a book, and other writers may
only contribute as editors. All writers are expected to collaborate freely and
openly within the booksprint process.
Peer to Peer
Production
The peer to peer production movement originated in the Free
Software and Hackerspace communities. Bauwens (2009) separates the terms peer production,
peer governance and peer property to give an overview of the economy of peer to
peer production. Peer production occurs wherever a group of peers decides to
engage in the production of a common resource. Peer governance occurs
where the groups chooses to govern themselves. Peer property is the term uses
to define the the institutional and legal framework the group selects to guard
against the private appropriation of the common work, usually involving of
non-exclusionary forms of universal common property, as defined through the
General Public License, some forms of the Creative Commons licenses, or similar
derivatives.
The Remix
function
The remix function on the FLOSS Manuals website seems to
confirm the fluid, ongoing nature of a book. AS (Hyde? suggests: )
The remix function is a way to enable people
to customize the content within a given work for their own environment. With
remixing, you can format the book to your own standards and then publish from
this remix with your own preference. Many people use this function for
educational purposes. But generally people find it difficult to drop the legacy
of the book and alter content, there’s a sort of symbolic attachment to it.
“Remixing” is more of a catch phrase made popular from the music business, than
actually utilized[I11] .
Federated
Publishing
One might also use the term Federated
Publishing, born from Federated Social
Network theory, which in its critique of proprietary network services produced
a modern Free Software an active and vibrant practice born from this
ideological legacy.
Federated Publishing was
anticipated by this astonishing passage from
Marshall McLuhan (1966):
Instead of going out and buying a packaged
book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the
telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and they at once
Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all the
latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out on a
bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is
where we are heading under electronic conditions. Products increasingly are
becoming services[I12] .”
Many quote this passage as a prophecy of the Internet but I would argue that it is not
a vision of the Internet, but better describes the kind of space in which FLOSS
Manuals operates
. Federated Publishing is not a
model, but can be considered a network of models, enabling multiple approaches
to content production, distribution, and consumption. At this point, within
FLOSS Manuals, the space is enabled by four core elements.These are the
digitally networked corpus of works, the
interoperable free/libre licensed content, the federated open book production
and “publishing” platforms and the active participation of groups of
people. t[I13]
Translation
Translation, the ability to make the manuals available to
anyone to read is also important to FLOSS manuals. ,. So there is a subdomain
in Farsi, others in Finnish, Spanish and French. Writing software manuals in
Farsi has required special software coding to make the text pages read
backwards, from right to left, as Farsi is read. In examining Fuller’s media
ecologies, these translation subdomains are like similar landscapes, hybrids of
the each other. FLOSS manual’s translation tools keep the project open. Books
migrate with little effort across languages, taken to them by eager volunteers
who want to bring their benefits to their own communities.
Networks
How does the strong-loose collaborative network nourish
itself? In 2009 I attended Winter Camp, a conference hosted by the Institute of
Network Cultures in Amsterdam[I14] .
The aim of the conference was to study how different kinds of loose networks
survive and collaborate, to support ongoing network models and encourage
sustainable models. The FLOSS Manuals group used the opportunity of this
get-together to be better friends and forge strong kinships, and in between,
get around to doing a bit of work on strengthening FLOSS Manuals’s focus and philosophy.
Remix
The remix function is a way to enable people to customize
the content within a given work for their own environment. With remixing, you
can format the book to your own standards and then publish from this remix with
your own preference. Some might use this function for educational purposes, for
example.
FLOSS Manual’s ‘Remix’ function.
facilitates writing and publishing, and can be used by anyone who wants to
generate book content, publish books, store books, sell books, cut and copy
from books[I15] , or make mash-ups from book chapters using
Using it the writer can make a book
by printing out the pages, formatted with CSS or other formatting software, and
cut and paste to create a new paper-based book that could be a magazine,
newspaper, pamphlet, poster or postcard, ticket, bookmark. Using the manual
techniques to publish, the paper copy can then be taken (or sent) to a printer
to manufacture one or many copies.
This action of copy, cut and paste
brings with it an artistic or aesthetic approach to the work, making the result
individual. The manual process creates a texture on the page, and some may see
the result as a further interpretation (or re-interpretation) of the text. For
example, early poster design work f*INK undertook
lacked any kind of budget, so the basic poster was designed using digital
tools, printed, photocopied, and colour was added using potato prints. Not only
was the colour stronger than standard offset printing inks, but no two posters
ever turned out the same.
The range of print technologies
available allow for printing to be approached at various scales, so print-on-demand
suppliers can print single copies quite cheaply, whereas a web-offset print
supplier such as a newspaper publisher, can print many copies of a single
edition cheaply also.
Wall newspaper – open publishing possibilities
With paper paste-up, there is the
flexibility to style and design your own edition, adding manual techniques such
as drawing, crayon, and extra images. There is more control over layout, not
being constrained by the dimensions of the screen. Space and spacing becomes
easier to control. Even the addition of advertising or sponsor logos becomes
easier.
It should be possible produce a wall newspaper with the
FLOSS Manuals Objavi publishing tool, but although significant progress has been made on
the development of this software, it is still not functioning to the point
where an acceptable newspaper format PDF can be generated.
Objavi uses a variety of software
tools to create PDF format books for print from HTML/CSS pages. The text and
images are retrieved from an online database, and Python, Webkit tools and CSS
are used to style the text, scale images and layout pages before print. Many
FLOSS Manuals titles can be bought as printed and bound A4 or A5 books from
print-on-demand Lulu.com. And yet the newspaper format is currently unworkable
due to the multiple columns required[I16] .
“Open Source Publishing is first of all an
attempt to facilitate a design practice that starts from a critical use of technology
and explicitly functions in an ecology of knowledge based on distribution and
circulation rather than competition and exclusion.” (Snelting, 2008)
It should be possible to produce a wall newspaper as a single folded broadsheet
page, printed both sides, that can be read when folded, or attached to a wall
for reference and perusal. Using Objavi, this wall newspaper would be created
using open source software that allows the text to flow in columns, that scales
and fits images within columns, provides the means to create a masthead, insert
extra articles, pages, caption or reference boxes. Using the powerful Remix
tool, users can take chapters or sections from different books, and compose a
new book (or magazine) of their own selection of chapters.
But is an entirely digital solution
the answer here? Perhaps the answer goes back to my experience with the
integration of digital with analogue. A paper paste-up of remixed articles from
FLOSS Manuals A1 paper sheets would only require that A4 sheet printing,
scissors, and glue, and the manual labour to composite the text. This solution is
not entirely digital, and does not suffer from a fetishisation of the digital.
This paper paste-up might be regarded as an analogue hack, a means towards new
open source publishing methods liberating the means of production.
Conclusion
My experiences with f*INK and other print media have led to
some surprising confluences. The means of production has always included both
analogue and digital methods, either because of a technical need or an
aesthetic reason. Bringing these two practices together, I can see the need for
another open publishing outcome for FLOSS Manuals, one that integrates both
manual and digital tools and techniques.
--------------
Bibliography
Contributors, The. Collaborative Futures (2010). FLOSS
Manuals via Lulu.com
Bauwens, Michel. ‘The Emergence of
Open Design and Open Manufacturing’, We-Magazine-2
(2009), http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-2/the-emergence-of-open-design-and-open-manufacturing
Debord, Guy. Definitions. Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris,
June 1958). Translated by Ken Knabb.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art
Technoculture. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
McLuhan, Marshall. Predicting
Communication via the Internet, interview with Robert Fulford, May 8, 1966, on
CBC‚ This Hour Has Seven Days.
Snelting, Femke. “Awkward Gestures:
Designing with Free Software” mag.net
Reader 3, March 2008.
[1]
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies:
Materialist Energies in Art Technoculture. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
[2]http://vimeo.com/4078924
[I9]I’m
finding it hard to work out the relationships between Flossmanuals, ooki and
Booksprints- could you write a sentence explaining their relationship?
