[TOS] Textbook Outline: moving forward

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

I've been continuing to make edits to the textbook outline based on some 
of the outstanding feedback from the softhum workshop at Drexel... but now 
I find myself going over and over the same ground.  Some of the pieces of 
the outline seem weird and superfluous, but some of the pieces seem pretty 
much dead on.

Where we are now:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Gregdek/Textbook

It's time to figure out what's next -- and I think that means "let's start 
writing."  Find our authors, validate the basic structure of the outline, 
hand off a few chapters while we continue to hammer out the others, put 
forth a simple schedule, and get to work.

First, let's get some assumptions together, so that potential authors 
understand what they're getting into.  I'd like to propose the following 
assumptions.

Assumption #1: This will be, in its entirety, a CC-licensed book.  Once we 
know who our authors are, we can then get together to decide which 
license, exactly, we will all choose.  Technically, it might even be 
possible to have each author decide which license to use individually, so 
long as the choices do not preclude the aggregation of content into a 
single text -- but these are decisions I believe that we can sort out 
later.  So long as we all agree to CC licensing, I see no impediment to 
moving forward.

Assumption #2: Release Early, Release Often.  Since we are not bound by 
traditional economies of scale for paper books, we do not need to achieve 
perfection to chase a print deadline.  That's not to say it can be a 
sloppy text, of course, but it does mean that we should be comfortable 
allowing people to see, and even use, the work in progress.

Assumption #3: Remixable.  This will not be a static text.  We will, at 
some point, get to a "release" version of the text, and it may be that 
this version is the one that makes it to print, either through a publisher 
or some self-publishing agent like Lulu.com.  But if some professor 
decided to take a chunk right out of our text to put into a software 
engineering book, all the better, so long as the terms of the license are 
followed.

I now have two questions.

Question #1: Are you, dear readers, interested in taking up the pen?  Any 
of you?  Do you think we've got some places to start, and are their pieces 
you feel like you could take, basically, now?

Question #2: If so, do you agree with the assumptions that I've proposed?

As soon as we've got a handful of people who say "yes" to both, we'll 
proceed to look a bit more closely at what we've got.

Basically, it's time to figure out who's on board.  So.  Who's on board?

--g

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