Imagine a textbook where a pupil and her teacher can choose topic depth, clarity of text or homework difficulty as needed and necessary. Where teachers can choose alternatives supporting different instruction methods and teaching styles, and schools can allow different chapter content based on time constraints or policy. Books where parents can get a topic summary to read before helping with homework. And then imagine finding all this in the same book. This talk introduces the Kaizendo project, where the goal is to make books like this possible.

1. Textbooks, the Free Software way
FSCONS, 2010-11-06

2. Salve J. Nilsen
"Primus Motor"

3. Sveinn Sandvik Svendsen
"Secundus Motor"

5. Good helpers:
Tomas Doran (Catalyst/Moose/Bicycles)
Ben Cawkwell (JS/jQuery/Dreads)
Stig Sandbeck Mathisen (Sysadmin/Pimp)
Eskild Jacobsen (Sexy Voice)
Marius Kjerkreit (Reverse Engineer)
David Bowdley (Knows English)
NUUG Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
Runbox AS
Redpill Linpro AS

7. Three "actors"

8. 1.Students

9. 2. Authors

10. 3. Activists

12. 1. Students

14. Student = Pupil
Members of the homogeneous group,
Pupils

15. Textbooks are for pupils

16. But what if the pupil has a
special need?

17. Teacher: "Sure, I can give you
some attention"

18. Teacher's attention is limited
30 kids per class
24 hours per day

19. Kids still need attention

20. Let's improve it

21. Let's make
Customizable textbooks

22. If you have a special need,
let the textbook help

23. How?

24. One book
With one narrative, one story

25. Multiple ways of telling the
same story
"Aspects"

27. Keywords: Aspects with a
coherent narrative
Good stories, just for you

29. 2. Authors

30. Writing is difficult
Lots to think about

31. Facts, which ones to tell, and which ones to hint about
Narrative, storyline, how to tell the facts
Language, simple/verbose vs. precise/terse
Illustrations and pictures, how they support text
Scannability, skimmability, readability, typography
Pedagogic methods the text supports
Ortography, speling misstakes
Design and layout
Homework assignments, and how they're used
Marketing and publicity
Time constraints of the reader and teacher
Physical constraints of the medium
Curriculum requirements from government
...

32. That's why authors need help
Editors, copywriters

33. Still...

34. Even with help,
errors creep in

35. Let's improve it

36. "Given enough eyeballs,
all bugs are shallow"
Linus' Law

37. Make it easy to give feedback
Publicly, in context

38. Context-specific feedback

39. Annotation heatmaps
More discussion ➡ More color

40. Select context, then comment

44. Keywords: Contextual
discussions with heatmaps
See what the current discussion is

46. 3. Activists

47. Actually, it's more like...

48. 3. Activists, Lawyers,
Lobbyists, Politicians

49. Anyone who is writing texts for
the public

50. Texts that must be good

51. ...because many people are
interested in the result

52. Public hearings

53. Contracts

54. Press releases

55. How to write these?

56. Incrementally

57. Google docs?

58. Wikis?

59. Yes, they help, but...

61. Keywords: Incremental
improvement
Timelines, comparison, diffs

63. Three groups

64. Three issues

65. Each with similarities

66. The keywords:

67. Aspects w/coherent narrative
that are
improved incrementally
by allowing
contextual discussions
w/heatmaps

68. Textbooks, the Free Software way

69. Treat textbooks as
Free Software projects

70. Free software has...
Tight feedback loops
Bugtracker
Mailing list / Forum – with searchable archives
IRC / IM
Unit tests, Continuous Integration tools
Revision control
A core, with commit rights
Time lines, Changelogs, stable/dev releases
Anyone can contribute ("Patches are welcome")
Release early, release often / Many eyeballs / etc.
OSI approved license
Four freedoms
Ability to fork projects when necessary

71. We want to make these tools
available to authors
And their communities

72. Wanna help? :)

74. What do we have now?

75. [Demo]

76. http://github.com/sjn/Kaizendo
Fork it now!

77. irc://irc.freenode.net/kaizendo
#kaizendo on Freenode

78. http://talk.kaizendo.org/
Tech mailing list: Kaizendoers

80. Inspiration

81. COMT and stet
About
The software behind the http://co-ment.net/
annotation service
Django-based, with custom annotation
frontend
Inspired by stet - FSF's tool used for the
GPLv3 commenting process
Project website: http://co-ment.org/

82. stet
http://code.softwarefreedom.
org/projects/stet

85. COMT
http://www.co-ment.org/

88. Discussion heatmaps++
We want them!

89. Inspiration II

90. Information Design
Polyscopy
Dino Karabeg, University of Oslo

91. Code
We've started on the prototype!

92. It's a Catalyst app
App::Kaizendo

93. Backend: KiokuDB
Just to get things up and running

94. Moose goodness

95. REST API goodness
(or madness)

96. JavaScript heavy front-end
Blueprint, jQuery, (Aloha editor?)

97. Content: HTML5
KISS

99. Future?

100. Plenty of goodness
to play with!
-Ofun

101. Git backend!

102. Textbook project forking
git clone http://kaizen.do/history1.git

103. Discussion syncronization
Salmon+Atom

104. Bug tracker backend for
discussions?
stet used RT

105. Presentation options
PDF, different eBook formats,
Audio

106. Plenty of fun to have!

108. Content?

109. We need textbook
project "seeds" too
"Bootstrapping projects"

110. Textbook projects
already exist
WikiBooks, ndla.no, CC,
OER Grapevine, etc. etc.

111. S.1714: Open College
Textbook Act of 2009
Introduced to Congress 2009-
09-24,
Currently in committee

112. There'll be enough
textbooks
We "just" need the tool, and to
build the communities

114. License?

115. GNU Affero GPLv3
"the Business GPL"

116. Textbooks, the Free Software way

117. Questions?

118. Textbooks, the Free Software way
Salve J. Nilsen <sjn@kaizendo.org>
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