Solving the problems of 10 Things That Will Be Free…

Tomas Krag thinks he may have the solution to the problem with writing books in a wiki fashion, as discussed in an earlier post. He reports from the other side of London, where he’s engaged in a “book sprint”, trying to write a guide to wireless networking in the developing world over the course of a few days.

This blog-entry is extremely well timed, as I’m currently in London at a hacker conference writing an open book about wireless networks in the developing world. I’m not actually writing the book, I just gathered the right people in one room, and in the amazing space of 4 days we’ve gone from vague idea to pretty well fleshed-out outline with a few chapters already written for good measure. We’re calling the model a BookSprint, even though it’ll take us at least a month after the event to complete the writing and edit the book, but the intriguing thing about this is that we may have solved exactly the problem that you elude too, by gathering consesus about an outline and a vision. Instead of a large 300-page blob of text we’ve essentially converted this project into a about 20 independent articles, and some concerted editing to make it all read like a book….

Talking with Tomas over a beer last night, it sounds like the key to making the process work is having an editor who’s sufficiently experienced in shepherding large writing projects and largely without ego over ownership of the project. Might just be a scaleable project if those folks are in sufficient supply…