here's an outline for the upcoming research meeting at WORM of the 'Libre Graphics Research Unit', which I am organizing in collaboration with the excellent FLOSS Manuals.

We comprised a programme of lectures, project presentations and writing sessions revolving around the theme of 'Federated Publishing', with guests including Nuraini Juliastuti, Marcell Mars, Sacha van Geffen, Mick Fuzz and Eric Kluitenberg + a netlabel presentation of Panospria with scant intone + freida abtan + martijn comes + ∆D∆E∆W∆ + special guests: ike yard

please find more info via http://worm.org,

and/or have a read below:

"Federated publishing takes all of the concepts of ease of online book
production, collaboration, and reuse - and applies them to a new
networked model of publishing.

Federation is not new to the web, Email is a federated system - it
doesn't matter where you have your email account you can still
communicate with other people who have email accounts elsewhere. However
federation of this kind is not the architecture of choice for
monopolistic social network enterprises like Facebook. Facebook will not
enable you to install your own Facebook for your business or school, nor
does it enable communication between users on Facebook and users on
other social networks.

We want a federated architecture for online book production and
publishing. Anyone should be able to set up their own online book
production/publishing service and share books with other book
production/publishing networks. Enabling anyone to reuse any book, anywhere.

Federated Publishing supports traditional, established book production
techniques while fueling radically different approaches. To achieve
healthy Federated Publishing on the web 4 key elements need to be built up:

* Free content
* Federated book production platforms
* People participating
* Economic models
There is currently not a prolific exploration of this model. Federated
Publishing is currently only illustrated, I believe, by FLOSS Manuals.
In FLOSS Manuals anyone can clone or migrate a book to another platform,
reuse and change the book without permission, and publish it wherever
they like. This is Federated Publishing.

Federated Publishing was anticipated by this astonishing passage from
Marshall McLuhan ("Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966)",
interview with Robert Fulford, May 8, 1966, on CBC’s This Hour Has Seven
Days):

"Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have
been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone,
describe your interests, your needs, your problems’ and they at once
Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all
the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out
on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service.
This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions. Products
increasingly are becoming services."
This passage is usually quoted as a prophesy of the Internet to come.
However it is not a vision of the Internet, but a vision of the book and
Federated Publishing. An open network of book production platforms
connecting people and books.

In contrast proprietary publishing dominates the search for new
distribution formats and economic models, reward systems for authors and
others, and fuels an unwillingness to make content interoperable on a
technical, legal, or social cultural level. It was this context McLuhan
imagined we were escaping. Federated Publishing provides this mechanism."