How to bypass internet censorship? Booksprint
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Put a lot of activists and a lot of techies in the same house for a week,
and see what happens.
A booksprint is kind of an amazing methodology.
It's the idea of making a book in 2 to 5 days
and the publishing industry considers something like 9 months or 12 months to be super incredibly fast.
And we can create a book in a minimum of 2 days.
But usually it's about five days.
And when I say create a book that means
we walk in the door on a monday morning, 9 o'clock usually,
usually not many people know each other,
it's a group of 5 to 10 people.
And we write a book from the title, that's all we have to start with.
So we spend a few hours outlining the book,
we write it together and then right at the very end
make produce all the illustrations, right at the very end we press export
and we get a book formatted PDF which we upload to a print-on-demand service.
So it's really from zero to book in 2 to 5 days, which is phenomenally fast.
Actually it's very interesting,
living with some geeks that are working collaboratively on a project.
It's outcome will be helping the dissidents, helping the people,
in the countries that are under totalitarian governments, repressive regimes
that don't want Internet freedom, press freedom.
And this is kind of defending press freedom and also the freedom of Internet.
So software projects have made incredibly rapid progress
when they've gotten people together in one place for a sprint.
And it's nice to see that that also can work for writing.
Spending 24 hours together, the discussions here,
and the challenges, maybe the difficulties, and talking about the different ways,
and editing it in a collaborative way when you're in physical contact:
I think it's very important.
There was a lot of dialogue:
on how to phrase things, how to communicate things effectively
What to put in? If we had enough to offer
the various types of people who would read the book?
I think the end product is good, even if you're a complete novice,
and you didn't realize that you needed circumvention tools until very recently,
or if you're tech-savvy and you didn't know
that this whole other area of technology to help people existed,
I think it has a lot to offer people at all sorts off levels.