Hi all, This was mailed to the bf-docboard list as well, but it's a good topic to get feedback on here as well.
Here's an idea I have to get public funding via our community to increase the quantity and quality of documentation projects. "Blender Proceedings" - Magazine style and size, full color - 80 pages, quality paper, 200 grs cover - Regular issues, like 4 x per year - Contents available in wiki.blender.org compatible formatting and license - Printed versions being sold online, pdf (ebook?) freely downloadable Topics for a Proceedings issue can depend on anything we consider worth investing time in. Especially it can become a means for our active documenters (and new writers) to spend considerable time on a documentation project while getting a fee paid for it. I also consider to invite developers to participate in this, to get good technical (but readable for users!) docs. In many cases a Proceedings can be filled by multiple authors, they then just share the fees. An editor (and reviewer) should be found as well, who can get a mentoring fee. The name "Proceedings" has been picked to not present this as manual or tutorials, but to always strive for reflecting current development, or important missing docs for Blender. Issues can also be a report on activities such as the Sintel Open Movie project, or the full report on all presentations at the Blender Conference. To make issues somewhat attractive, artwork or galleries can be included as well. Bizzplan: - printing costs 4000 euro (1000 copies) - writer fixed fee: 3000 euro - mentor fixed fee: 500 euro - DTP design: 2400 euro With a sales price of 19 euro, it will need to sell a little over 500 to get return of costs. My estimate is we can sell maybe a 1000, provided it's well designed and attractive. Profits then goes to financing the next issue. The better it works, the more docs! After doing a first issue, we can also evaluate it, and offer a subscription model to pre-finance it all (4 issues for 60 euro or so). Start shooting crits! :) Thanks, -Ton- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ton Roosendaal Blender Foundation t...@blender.org www.blender.org Blender Institute Entrepotdok 57A 1018AD Amsterdam The Netherlands _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers