Yesterday I delivered a talk at OpenFest’2009 to share my rich experience in writing free open-source books with a large team authors and editors. Particuarly I presented the methodology, the organizational and management practices I applied during the work on my last successfull project of this kind: the open source book “Introduction to Programming with Java” written in less than 6 months by a team of 30 authors, consisting of 25 chapters and 962 pages. In the presentation and demonstrations I focused on the most important activities and practices that make such projects successfull:

• Defining the scope of the book (list of chapters)
• Creating a detailed guidelines for the authors specifying the writing style and practices
• Defining the templates for each chapter (topic) containing its structure (headings, subheadings and TODOs)
• Conducting the team meeting to assigning a chapter to each of the authors
• Creating a project plan, assigning tasks and deadlines for each author and tracking the work progress
• Managing the authors and working with authors missing their deadlines
• Performing a review of the text

My presentation (in Bulgarian) and all demonstration real world examples are available for download:

• Nakov-OpenFest2009-How-to-Write-a-Book-with-Team-of-30-Authors.ppt
• How-to-Write-a-Book-with-Team-of-30-Authors-Demos.zip

Visit the Web site of the book Introduction to Programming with Java to see the result of described book writing methodology: www.introprogramming.info.