[PD] mickfuzz's Pure Data FLOSS Manual, a message on behalf of Pd's community

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

Em seg., 22 de nov. de 2021 às 10:36, José de Abreu <abreubacelar at gmail.com>
escreveu:

> I see potential in having such a place for the community.
>

I see your point and a while ago I also mentioned how Csound has a FLOSS
Manual that doesn't conflict to what they call 'the canonical manual'.
Something like that can happen and that's what actually happened back then
(and I was part of it as one of the contributors. Now, that looks good in
theory. In practice, I don't believe in it so much, hence, the FLOSS Manual
has been abandoned now for so many years, none of the original authors were
there to keep it alive (me included), I spoke to Derek (one of the main
forces behind this, who doesn't follow the list anymore) and he had no
login or will to get back on this (he considered 'timed served' and I agree
and thank him for his services).

Anyway, where I'm getting at is that we might not pull it off... I brought
this up in may here, also into the Pd Forum and on the facebook group,
nothing happened. It stayed in my to do list until I finally tried getting
access...

And I, for one, am much more concerned now in helping with Pd's manual. I
wrote a new section on managing externals, for instance. Others have
contributed nicely to it. I guess we can start and focus, as a community,
to help with Pd's documentation first, before envisioning such ambitious
side/complementary projects.

This is why I'm just hoping to change the title of this FLOSS Manuals to
'Pd-extended', put a remark on its introduction that it is a historical
document, and leave it at that.

If people want to still join forces and work on a new one from scratch,
great. I can see if I can also join in, awesome, but that's something else.


> For example, we can talk properly about pd forks, the differences between
> them, we can teach people how to install some fork, we can create tutorials
> about externals, and put content that could make people easily choose some
> external for something specific that they want to do in their projects
> (this is something that would also make the experience with deken better,
> people could go to floss and search for some topic, and find which
> externals would need to use following some tutorial, and then download them
> from deken following instructions, this would be great for people arriving
> at pd!).
>


> A second pd place would be great to put tutorials where the community can
> create and teach all sort of things, from basic examples of doing a simple,
> but complete project, explain some concept going from the start to end
> doing it in practice, gather information pointing to other sites with other
> tutorials (think about "read more:" and put some links to other places
> explaining the same subject, some relevant discussions on pd forum,
> relevant e-mails, maybe even links without using pd at all, why not?).
>

By the way, we also have puredata.info which is also in desperate need of
attention and updates, and could be used to do a lot of what you propose
here. And there is no point in starting a new parallel project that no one
knows if it'll succeed or not.

Just like Pd's actual manual, I think working on puredata.info is also a
priority for the community. The current status of puredata.info is also a
result of lack of community engagement. It is great that people are showing
interest in new places and channels like 'Discord' now, but this also feels
to me like digression and a way to decentralize and create parallel small
communities instead of a bigger and more cohesive group.

This email list, the github repository, the puredata.info site should be
the place anyone interested in contributing to Pd must come and gather
around. But of course, everyone is free to do whatever they want. Start a
new Tutorial on FLOSS Manuals or wherever else. Create a youtube channel, a
tiktok account, a wiki, a new fork of Pd, but all I can say is that this
decentralized model hasn't been sustainable for us as a community.

 cheers
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