[HacktionLab] Fwd: FLOSS Manuals is 20 Years old today! Let's celebrate.

[m3shrom]

Hi there,

This rather long post below by me is worth sharing if only for the link 
to the original of this ole house (not Shakin' Stevens!)

But if you want to join for 1 month of discussion future of community 
documentation (or at least flossmanuals) you can join here.
http://lists.flossmanuals.org.uk/listinfo.cgi/community-flossmanuals.org.uk

I would actually like to collaborative an mimimal update to 
https://archive.flossmanuals.org.uk/tech-tools-for-activism/  - perhaps 
we can table that for Nottingham?

And can I just say how fooking right we were about being farmed! Can we 
get a T shirt?


nice one
Mick
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	FLOSS Manuals is 20 Years old today! Let's celebrate.
Date: 	Mon, 1 Jun 2026 15:12:43 +0100
From: 	Mick Fuzz <mickfuzz23 at gmail.com>
To: 	community at lists.flossmanuals.org.uk



Hello friends, it's Mick here from Floss Manuals.

Floss Manuals is 20 years old today. We've chosen the 1st of June as our 
celebration date because it's the first time the project was captured by 
the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Although I got in touch with 
Adam Hyde our founder and he said it was actually Feb :)

Over the last few months, me, Martin Kean and Helen Varley Jamieson have 
been working on improvements and updates to the Floss Manuals community 
infrastructure. We'd like to use this anniversary as the starting point 
for a month of community activity to help reboot the network.

The process of writing my PhD using open documentation tools, I think, 
could align with a new direction for Floss Manuals, which is, to me, to 
take the plunge and move towards writing with static websites and Git 
instead of a centrally managed, specialised content management system as 
we have used before.

This move is also practical. For several years the French Floss Manuals 
community generously took on the task of running Booktype on behalf of 
the wider project, including the English-language community, and I'd 
like to thank them for that work. They took the decision to stop 
maintaining the platform in April 2024, which was entirely 
understandable. Since then, the project has effectively been on hold.

The overhead of running and maintaining systems such as Booki and 
Booktype has become increasingly difficult to sustain after Floss 
Manuals became a volunteer-run project. Moving towards static websites 
and Git may offer a more sustainable path forward.

As part of this post I'm also including a link to a song called /This 
Old House/. Some people in the UK will know it as a Shakin' Stevens 
song, but I prefer the original version. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WhLhF12TBE - check the lyrics, it's a 
bit darker than Shakie's take.

Being involved with Floss Manuals has sometimes felt a bit like looking 
after an old house. There have been things falling off it, services 
shutting down, and periods where I haven't been able to repair or add to 
things as quickly as they've broken. I've been a bit of a caretaker. But 
it's a good old house, and it's a house that's worth patching up.

Of course, there's another thing that's about to fall off the roof of 
the house.

I recently received an email from our hosting provider to say that they 
will no longer be supporting the Mailman mailing lists that we've used 
throughout much of Floss Manuals' history. So, beyond making sure that 
we preserve and archive what's there, one of the jobs that needs doing 
is working out what comes next for community communications.

This may actually be a good opportunity to start again and let people 
choose what they want to subscribe to, whether that's a low-traffic 
announcements list, a more active community discussion list, or 
something else entirely.

I do already have an offer from someone who can provide a Mailman list 
if we want to keep things old school, but I'm also open to updating the 
technology if there's a better approach. Email me directly if you have a 
suggestion or offer.

We've got another couple of months before this mailing list reaches its 
end of life, and in some ways that's helpful. I feel slightly hesitant 
about generating a lot of traffic in people's inboxes if this reboot 
discussion becomes active, and that's something we can look at together. 
At least we know that there is an end date for activity on this list, 
and that gives us a reason to decide what comes next.

Of course, if you'd rather not be part of those discussions, the link to 
unsubscribe is at the bottom of every email.

In the coming weeks I'll write more about the huge number of people who 
have contributed to Floss Manuals and the equally huge body of work that 
has been created over the last twenty years. I won't try to start 
listing people or projects now.

I'd also love it if other people could chip in with their own memories, 
thanks, stories about what they learned, or tributes to particular 
people who made a difference to them along the way.

I'd like to invite people to write blog posts for us, or simply start 
thinking about what they might want to remember and share. As part of 
this reboot process I've migrated our previous blogs to a new Hugo-based 
website, which is now available at: http://about.flossmanuals.net

It would be great to see that site become a place where we can collect a 
bit more of the history, memories and lessons from twenty years of Floss 
Manuals.

It would also be great to hear where people are now. Floss Manuals has 
connected an rich diversity and quantity of people over the years. I 
think many people would be interested to hear what you've been doing 
since, whether there are things you learned through the project that 
stayed with you, and whether you see any parallels between the work 
you're doing now and the work we did together through Floss Manuals.

On that note, I also want to share some personal good news.

Last Wednesday I successfully defended my PhD thesis in a viva 
examination, which feels like a pretty important milestone for me.

Looking back, I can see a lot of connections between that work and my 
involvement with Floss Manuals. Many of the ideas that shaped the 
research, particularly around collaborative working, open documentation, 
participation and sharing knowledge, were influenced by things I've 
learned through being involved with this community over the years.

The thesis is available online at pump.jammlabs.org.uk. I still need to 
make a few final corrections, but it's now in a form that people can 
read. There's also a particular blog post related to the research that I 
think may be of interest to people here, which I'll share alongside it.


          /A Future for non-linear FLOSS Manuals/

    /While most manuals in FLOSS Manuals have been linear, there have
    also been ones which were more complex in structure. For example,
    some have been about process, exploration, and a kind of
    pick-and-mix approach. A good example of this is Digital
    Foundations, which moves between guided instruction and open-ended
    experimentation rather than forcing a single path through the material
     From /https://pump.jammlabs.org.uk/blogs/meeting-middle/

I'd genuinely be interested to hear where other people have ended up, 
what projects you're involved in these days, and whether Floss Manuals 
played any part in shaping the path that got you there.

I'll also share some of the technical changes that have been made, along 
with some of the new approaches to publishing that we're experimenting 
with. I'll do that in a way that invites discussion, because I don't 
think there's only one way forward and I'd be interested to hear 
different views on how we should approach these things.

So, given those teasers of different directions for discussion, that's 
probably enough for this celebratory post.

Feel free to chip in with your thoughts and responses in any way you 
want by hitting "reply all".

nice one
cya
Mick

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