Status of the picture book

[Nicu Buculei]

Ian Weller wrote:
> stabus report/slight rant time now -- it looks long but please read :)
> 
> 1) Blocking on release forms. I'm assured RH Legal is working on it. In
>    the meantime if you're willing to take photos of people and have
>    their contact information so you can hunt them down with a New and
>    Improved Release Form then there's no reason stopping you; you just
>    can't upload them to the wiki yet.

I am sorry to say this, but I feel this process is kind of bogus. One 
thing we learned from FOSS is that license proliferation is a bad thing 
and on the same line of thought, why Release Forms proliferation would 
be a good thing? Using the NIH syndrome is not in the FOSS spirit.

Is hard for me to understand what is the problem if I get a generic 
release form for "any media and any purpose"  and contribute it under 
CLA and an accepted license.

> 2) As far as I'm concerned we'll be using Lightning Source Inc. (LSI)
>    for publishing. It'll be on-demand, woo. We've yet to make a decision
>    on whether to print color or grayscale pages, and what page size we
>    want (I think I'm leaning towards 8.5" square). Any objectors should
>    reply to this email.

The decision about colors and page size would be in direct relation with 
the next point, initial funding.

> 3) I have no clue how we're getting initial funding. I made some
>    original contacts with gregdek and spevack but I'm so confused about
>    it. Somebody who knows what they're talking about with relation to
>    this (community architecture, etc) please reply to this message or to
>    me personally.

Which is the amount of money needed?

I am sure that if we can put together a god looking PDF format of the 
book it would be easier to get help with the funding.

> 4) The original plan of publishing four of these books at the very start
>    seems to be getting... less and less feasible per day. Right now I'm
>    at the idea of publishing one, 80-page book and selling that. We can
>    get at least 200 photos in there (more than one per page).
>    Understanding that we got about 20 or so photos from the wonderful Mo
>    Duffy at FUDConF11, this will make the target much more feasible.

Count on at least the same amount from various photographers at the Brno 
FUDCon.

> 5) We've got a great number of volunteers on our wiki page[1] but we
>    could still use more regional photographers. Keep in mind that if you
>    own a nice camera (generally a D-SLR) and you might have extra time
>    we'd absolutely love you to volunteer as a regional photographer.

I think we can count on at least 4 or 5 photographers in EU and a couple 
from India, just launch the project...

> 6) Does anybody know what we do to convert bitmap images to CMYK with
>    free software?

I don't have first hand experience with this, but from what I understand 
Scribus is all we need - http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Category:HOWTO

> 7) Are there any currently unanswered questions people have?
> 
> [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Picture_book

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/
photography: http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/