Lunch time of day two stands out as a high point of the book sprint. We'd spent the first day working relatively independently - brain-dumping the chapters about areas of CiviCRM that we knew the best and by Tuesday, it was clear the chapters making up our introductory section needed a re-think.

Last week I had the privilege of joining 10 other CiviCRM enthusiasts, along with a facilitator (Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals) for the CiviCRM Book Sprint. It was a fantastic experience on many different levels. More than anything else, it was great to meet in person and interact face-to-face with members of the core team and active members in the community—many of whom I’ve had forum-based contact with for several years.

In between (and often during) the writing, I had great opportunity to talk through how people have used and implemented CiviCRM, enriching my own understanding of the software and the possible capabilities it provides.

Both those discussions and the writing process itself made me appreciate even more how robust and flexible CiviCRM can be in meeting the diverse needs of non-profit organizations. As each chapter went through revisions, each reviewer brought their experience of how the software has been used, broadening and deepening the content and usefulness of the chapters.

The Book Sprint is over - and we met our goal: Zero to Book in 5 days.

Reflecting on the process, I am incredibly moved by the dedication and commitment which everyone on the sprint team brought to the process. People came together with a rich mix of experience and perspectives - and an amazing spirit of collaboration. It was a personal honor for me to be a member of this incredible team!

You can read the book online (in your browser) at:
>> http://en.flossmanuals.net/civicrm

and you can download a PDF version of the complete book by clicking the Make PDF icon in the upper left corner of that screen.

I am quite hopeful that this book will be a great resource both for current members of the CiviCRM community and for people who are evaluating whether CiviCRM might be a useful tool for their organizations. Please post your feedback and suggestions on the Documentation and Book section of the community forums.

Third day behind, pages count is 148 and raising. Actually, if we consider final format (size of pages) of the book, it would have 215 pages right now, but I'm using the count from temporarily generated PDF for sake of consistency with previous page count announcements from blog posts on day 1 and 2.

Second day of the sprint behind - manual pages count is now 117. We started at 9am as day before and continued writing until lunch. When we were sleeping, our off-site editor Andy came through a few chapters and introduced quite a lot of propositions, remarks and edits - so it was not only writing new text, but also integrating fixes to whatever was written so far. Second day was also the first one when off-site authors started contributing their chunks of text to the book.

Wow - to me personally, the first day of Book Sprint was quite a surprise. I knew there is a really cool and knowledgeable group of people here, and I also knew that getting away from everyday work really helps with focusing, but I just couldn't guess how productive this day will be. We gathered a few minutes after 9, Adam gave us an overview of Flossmanuals tools to get everyone up to speed, we claimed our chapters and started writing. First part of the day was pretty silent, only the sound of ferocious typing could have been heard.

The simple rule is - when you get tired with what you currently write about, take a rest or switch to writing something else. If you are unsure about the scope of your paragraph, ask others, have a little talk. As we were going further in our writing, more and more "synchronisation talks" were happening, people started peer reviewing their writing and brainstorming over different ideas.

Dinner time was nearing inevitably, when Michael thought it would be interesting to take a look of what the book would look like, if the PDF was generated. Wow! We already had around 60 pages. This includes table of contents and some other "non content" pages. By the time we went out for dinner (btw, absolutely awesome main course, really delicious black cod marinated in miso seasoning - thanks Jill!), we had 71 pages of PDF, all that just after the first day. We will be obviously moving this content around, improving it, adding more stuff bit this looks like a really good start. Can't wait until tomorrow! :-)

EDIT: Tony is also blogging from the sprint on Dharmatech blog, make sure to check it out. :-)

Long awaited day came - a bunch of good folks from CiviCRM Community arrived to Truckee to work on CiviCRM book! Some of us have been hanging out in San Francisco for some time already, attending NTEN and CiviCRM Developer and User Meetups, some of us arrived only today. First item of business was finalising book outline so that we can be ready to do actual writing on Monday morning. The outline looks quite detailed, but also realistic - it seems like it will be a busy week, but we should be enjoying the effects on Friday.

Stay tuned for news on the book - new information will be showing up on Twitter, as well as on #flossmanuals and #civicrm channels on IRC.

P.S. Doesn't look like the cover will be looking like anticipated. :-)

A quick reminder that the week long CiviCRM book sprint starts this Monday and you're welcome to participate by writing, reading and commenting on chapters and sections.

We'll be using the Floss manuals infrastructure. The best way start is by saying hello in the IRC chatroom which is available on the Floss manuals site or via an IRC client at #flossmanuals on irc.freenode.net.

Dave Greenberg recently posted about our upcoming book sprint saying "almost every week folks ask whether there is a CiviCRM Book they can read".

So there must be something missing from the documentation. And given that the book will be in addition to what is on the Wiki - not a replacement for it - the two questions I am asking myself are:

'What are we missing in the documentation? And how should the documentation and the book complement each other?'

Almost every week folks ask whether there is a CiviCRM Book they can read to help them learn about all the cool things that CiviCRM can do. Thanks to a grant from the Information Program initiative of the Open Society Institute - we will soon have just that (a big tip of the hat to the Information Program Project Manager for making this happen!).

We will be writing the book using tools and techniques developed and hosted by Floss Manuals - whose mission is to provide quality manuals about how to use free software. Adam Hyde, the founder of the Floss Manuals project will be guiding a team of CiviCRM users, integrators and core team members through the process of creating the book during a 5-day Book Sprint to be held during the week of May 4. The team will also have editorial support from Andy Oram who is an editor for technical publisher and information provider O'Reilly Media, specializing currently in open source technologies and software engineering.

The finished book will be available as a free PDF download from the Floss Manuals site. Those who want a printed hard-copy book can purchase it for a nominal fee from the Floss Manuals store. Check out the How to Bypass Internet Censorship manual for an example of a finished product.