hey all, I think many on the list know I manage a community called FLOSS Manuals, and we create free documentation about free software. Recently I have been considering the development of free (libre) educational materials - specifically getting the current FM materials used in existing courses, or developing new text books. The possibilities for free textbooks are enormous and exciting. Not only can libre texts flow from one educational institute to another, but they can also be easily reused, recontextualised, translated, improved and updated. It would be very interesting, for example to consider integrating free textbooks into coursework where students improve textbooks for the next years intake etc. So, its a big area, but one that we are currently prepared for since we have now 1100+ members (800 in English, 300+ associated with other FM languages), strong collaborative partnerships with the FSF, Wikimedia Foundation, OLPC, Sugar, Mozilla Foundation, Sesawe (partially the Berkman Institute) plus numerous 'smaller' Free Software organisations such as Inkscape, Aspiration Technology and Xiph etc. So we have the members and alliances to help create something like this however, quite frankly, I don't know how to get a started getting educators or educational institutes involved. So, I am writing to the list to see if there might be anyone working in the tertiary education sector that might consider working with us to develop a textbook suitable for their curriculum? It would be preferable if the topic related to material we already have...so, in other words, a software related course would be more easily within our grasp than other subjects...We already have, for example, great books on Design (Digital Foundations - http://en.flossmanuals.net/DigitalFoundations), The Command Line (http://en.flossmanuals.net/gnulinux), and Inkscape (http://en.flossmanuals.net/Inkscape) amongst others... Once we have one book adopted, the road ahead might open up considerably which could lead to some very interesting possibilities... adam -- Adam Hyde Founder FLOSS Manuals German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563 Email : adam(a)flossmanuals.net irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals "Free manuals for free software" http://www.flossmanuals.net/about