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Book Sprints for Collaborative Content Creation and Design
- 1. From Zero to Book in 5 days Book Sprints for Collaborative Content Creation and Design Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 2. 10 years, hundreds of books Cover Art: Henrik van Leeuwen and others
- 3. ○ How can you sprint a book? ○ What about publishing? ○ International cases Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 4. How can you sprint a book? an idea, a group of experts a collaborative process a facilitator, a book production team, a platform a publication in 5 days Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 5. Writing & publishing platform https://coko.foundation Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 6. Technology and workflow “Too often, people propose technology as the mechanism for change. Technology doesn’t create change. People create change, with the assistance of technology.” — Adam Hyde, founder of Book Sprints and co-founder of Coko Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 7. Book Sprints workflow Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 8. What about publishing? DIY publishing Self-publishing platforms Publishers Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net Publishing with the press of a button
- 9. International cases Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 10. USAID: Power Africa Understanding Series Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
- 11. USAID: Power Africa Understanding Series Photo Credits: U.S. Dept of Commerce, Peter B. Davidson Power Africa
- 12. OpenStack Operations Guide Photo Credits: OpenStack Book Sprint 2014, CC-BY SA Book Sprints
- 13. Die Akademie: Lost in Führung Photo Credits: Akademie Book Sprint 2017, CC-BY SA Book Sprints
- 14. Haufe: WHY! Wenn Transformation plötzlich wirkt Photo Credits: Haufe Book Sprint 2018, CC-BY SA Book Sprints
- 15. Thank you for your attention! booksprints.net Barbara Rühling, barbara@booksprints.net
Editor's Notes
- My name is Barbara Rühling. I’m the CEO of Book Sprints, a lovely little company coming out of New Zealand. We facilitate group of experts to write a book in 5 days and “publish” it immediately.
- These are some examples of the books we have done, well really of the lovely cover art mostly done by our Book Sprints designer. We are not a publisher, but a publishing enabler, so to speak. We came to publishing from a different angle. Our founder Adam Hyde found a real need for rapid and collaborative book production. Ten years ago while working in open source software development, he realized that while a lot of people wrote a lot of code, the hated writing documentation, so there weren’t any manuals out there and noone to write them. So Adam developed ways to make writing documentation fast, efficient and fun. Over the last ten years the method has been refined and used to create hundreds of books, from software handbooks to academic books to books on digital leadership, to corporate publishing.
- Today I want to quickly walk you through what we do, how is it possible we sprint books in five days? As I said we are not a publisher and I usually don’t speak at publishing conferences, but I want to share some of the different publishing options our clients chose for their books. So I want to show you some cases of books we have done, many international ones, now also more and more from Germany.
- First things first, I promised to show you the secret sauce of how we make books in five days. A Book Sprint begins with One idea for a book - many times people come to us with topics that are hard to grasp, haven’t been well defined, or are too complex for any one person to simply write down; One group of experts; They come together for five days in an agile, collaborative process; With the help of a specialized team of a facilitator, copy editors, and designers, and our online platform that supports the process. At the end there is a book immediately ready to be published .
- Our sister organization, the Collaborative Knowledge foundation, develops open source tools for collaboratively editing and publishing journals and books. Here we see the online book building platform editoria. If you are interested, please check out https://coko.foundation. So does the technology enable you to sprint a book in five days? Not really. While the technology enables us to write and publish in ways we were not able to before, more than anything this is about workflows and about people.
- Here are some wise words from Adam Hyde, the founder of Book Sprints and co-founder of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation. Technology alone does not change workflows, people change workflows. You all know probably from your own environments, that changing workflows is not easy. Mostly because we as people aren’t always easy. We are all interesting people, and we all have different backgrounds and workstyles. You will realize that when you try to get an editor, a graphic designer, and a subject-matter expert (yesterday we had the example of the pharmacist and a journalist) to speak the same language. Then add to that that their personalities, say one is an introvert and the others are extroverts. While it isn’t easy, we very much believe in collaboration and we found ways to really make it work. We use intense collaboration in our Book Sprints, with groups of five to fifteen experts, and a team of rapid book production specialists. Our books are often interdisciplinary, so the experts may be from different disciplines, or different departments within their company. And now they come together to work through a complex topic in a very short time. So here our Book Sprints method and our trained facilitators make sure that each contributor can productively participate with their ideas, their personality and their work style. While the group is supported by the technology, it’s really the facilitator and the methodology that are the secret sauce.
- So what does our workflow look like? First there is a need. People come to us with the need for a book. Their software is too complex for one person to simply describe its functions. Or they discover that renewable energy in Africa fails within the first year and need to understand what can be done differently. Or they have no textbook for their master students about the interaction of humans and robots that combines both social sciences and robotics. They bring together a group of experts, with different experiences, say for a software manual the architects, customer support, and the marketing people. For the framework for renewable energy engineers, policy makers, and lawyers. Social scientists studying AI and roboticists. We send a facilitator and lock them in a room for five days, hopefully a room with a view over some rolling hills or a nearby beach. The facilitator guides a group of expert through the stages of the process, from conceptualization, structuring, writing, and editing, to finally producing the book. The process is iterative and goes through several cycles of revisions until the book reaches the standards of readability and comprehensiveness set by the peers. They are supported by our team of specialists for rapid book production including designers and copy-editors who all work simultaneously on the illustrations, layout, and copy-editing. After five days, the platform exports a beautifully designed book, copy-edited and basically peer-reviewed. We call this moment “Publishing”, although publishers may have a different understandings of the term.
- In the broadest sense, publishing is the distribution of knowledge. In a bit narrower sense, the distribution of curated knowledge in well-designed formats, through established channels. We say we publish the books in the sense that we make them available in print ready PDF and ePub formats at the end of the Sprint. We do not prescribe the distribution channels, and our clients have very different needs and ideas for distribution. As such we have for the most part quietly co-existed with publishers, and have been working with people who mostly also don’t have much to do with publishers. People come to us who have a real need to gather, “curate”, edit, and disseminate knowledge in a well-designed format. People who have mostly never worked with publishers. People who are not traditional authors. Many already have a big and well-defined audience (the community network of an NGO, the users of a technology, the master students of a curriculum). They often have their own established channels, their website, newsletters, seminars, clients. So we provide them with the final output, and they make it available online or even print it in what I call “DIY publishing”. Other clients chose self-publishing platforms, and others publish their books through publishing houses like O’Reilly. Some of our clients are publishers themselves.
- So let’s take a look at a few examples. These are some of our clients.
- The first example I want to talk about is Power Africa’s Understanding Series. USAID is the US government’s department for international development. Their program “Power Africa” just did their fourth Book Sprint with us. Their books are hugely successful with more than 30,000 print copies, many many more downloads, translated into French and plans for Portuguese translations. They are used in workshops and at conferences, and read by ministers and governments in many African states. Power Africa has a real need for these books that describe the very complex legal, financial and political processes of procuring large power projects. So they get together a group of lawyers who are the ones to negotiate these contracts, and they bring us in to help them turn their knowledge into books.
- This is Peter B. Davidson, General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Commerce, launching the new Power Africa handbook, Understanding Power Project Procurement, before a crowd of U.S. companies and other private sector partners, on March 1, 2018. This is a case of DIY Publishing. They make their book available on their website, print it at a printer, distribute it at their own workshops, conferences, etc. They are always out of stock so I don’t have a copy here. They don’t have an ISBN number.
- The next example is the OpenStack Operations Guide. OpenStack is an open source solutions with many many users but no comprehensive manual, and very distributed knowledge throughout different organizations and companies. It wasn’t something one technical writer could simply describe, because that mental model wasn’t anywhere accessible. Many companies like Cisco, Rackspace, Redhat and others collaborated to bring people together to develop that mental model and write the definitive guide. In the middle you see a screenshot of the table of content and people editing on PubSweet, the platform that we are currently using. The book was written by community members, and published online for free with an open license. It was so important that O’Reilly took it up and published it.
- Recently we’ve had more clients in Germany. Die Akademie für Führungskräfte der deutschen Wirtschaft has been developing their own leadership models for many years, but didn’t have a comprehensive go-to source. Many of their trainers had a different expertise, and they brought ten of them together to write a book about their model of leadership in the 21st century. They talked to several interested publishers, but the fastest process to get the book published would have taken 6-9 months. So they chose a self-publishing platform instead to get the books to their customers and their team as soon as possible.
- At the beginning of this year, we did a Book Sprint with Haufe Group. Being a publisher themselves they wanted to try this method, and they had a perfect case of a new method of organizational transformation that they wanted to refine, clarify within their team, and make available to their customers and readers. Naturally, Haufe published their in their own publishing house.
- To sum it up, we facilitate groups of experts to create a book in 5 days that is ready to be published immediately. We have seen many interesting touch points with publishers, some of which I talked about earlier, and are looking for other ways to collaborate. For some of the books we make that are published DIY, other publishing channels could be interesting. On the other hand, many publishers are looking for new workflows for content creation. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts and comments.