Hello!

We wanted to share a bit of the Rural Design Collective's activities this year - we are having an incredible experience working with New Artists Productions and are truly excited at the opportunities that our collaboration presents. 

This two-of-a-kind poster signed by the cast of "Mulan, Jr." is one of the unique rewards offered to Kickstarter backers.

Please back us and help spread the word! The new link for backers is http://sixes.cc/be-a-backer

Greetings, friends and supporters of the Rural Design Collective!

As promised, our new Kickstarter page for 2011 is ready at: http://kck.st/keA505

We also created our own longer-yet-easier-to-remember URL: http://sixes.cc/be-a-backer

Please consider backing us again this year, and share it with anyone who would be interested in our work.

We are very excited to work with New Artists Productions as they are a source of inspiration for the Rural Design Collective, making a difference in the quality of the arts and the lives of young people in rural Oregon.

Thank you.

The Rural Design Collective Mentees have been selected - we are thrilled to announce that Oceana Fields and Christopher Garcia will be joining us for their second year! Jenn Covington will be joining us from South Carolina and Anita Almich of New Artists Productions will be a director for one of our key project tracks. We are also interviewing a fourth potential mentee to work on our MathML project - and it looks very promising.

The first #rdcHQ planning session takes place tomorrow! We'll be mapping out our production schedule for the WordPress track. We will have another Kickstarter page to support our efforts this year. In the meantime, you can support us by buying our stuff. Thank you!

Our project tracks will be formally announced after our first planning session on June 8. It's going to be a great summer!

Illustration by Nathan Malamud, Junior Artist-In-Residence of the RDC

The 2011 Rural Design Collective Summer Mentoring Program is about to begin and we are planning our season and building project teams.

This summer, we have the opportunity to work with MathML (a new W3C standard markup language), hone our illustration skills creating vector graphics for a national open-source project, and learn WordPress to create a website for an inspiring area youth group! It promises to be an exciting program!

If you know someone who would like to apply, you can share this link or download materials here:

RDC 2011 Recruitment Flyer - 3.9MB PDF

RDC 2011 Brochure / Application Form - 5.5MB PDF

Deadline for application submissions is May 20, 2011. Follow the instructions on the application form, or email a completed application as a PDF file to webchick_AT_invisible.net.

Many thanks to our Kickstarter backers for your support in 2010 - we will send news as the 2011 season continues to develop, plus ways that you can help us continue our work! As always, you can follow our activities at our website - http://ruraldesigncollective.org/

Let the games begin! See you online or at #rdcHQ!

Big news from #rdcHQ - our "Public Domain Greatest Hits - Volume 1" is finally complete and on its way to our Kickstarter backers who selected this as their reward - complete with a readme file ... just in time for the holiday season :-)

Volume 2 is scheduled for an early Spring release, and we will have an update on 2011 activities at that time. We have several interesting potential projects and possible collaborators, so things are already heating up for next year. We have started early fundraising efforts at our own web site for now!

The Rural Design Collective thanks YOU for making 2010 an incredible year! Stay tuned ... we will keep everyone informed as we move forward.

Greetings, Kickstarter Backers!

We made an executive design decision at #rdcHQ to add an index to the printed versions of "E-Book Enlightenment" - this delayed shipping for about a week, so if you haven't received your copy yet - we assure you it is on its way! As an online PDF is searchable, an index is not necessary for the "Easy Reader Online Edition." However, we will reverse-engineer the index that we created for our survival kits to generate the index for the Easy Reader Print Edition (as time permits, of course!). Creating a patch of python code for this purpose sounds like a future project for the Rural Design Collective!

The "Teacher's Survival Kits" that shipped to our Kickstarter backers are now available for download here. This eco-friendly version is a standard format (8.5" x 11") and much more suited for material that is updated frequently - it can easily be printed, three-hole punched, and stored in a binder to keep the materials up-to-date as needed. If you are a teacher, we encourage you to download the beta version of this useful material today (We have dubbed it a "Beta Book" at #rdcHQ)! The version that we shipped to our backers is a collectible signed by our design team and bound using equipment from the BookMobile - but we will be making each section available online for easy access.

Our code release ships next week - so, for those of you who chose this as your reward - Stay tuned ...never a dull moment at #rdcHQ!

Greetings! We are wrapping up production at #rdcHQ, printing and binding the copies of "E-Book Enlightenment" that will ship on Monday to our Kickstarter backers, as well as a select group of beta-testers! The print version came out just wonderful, and led to the decision that we will release more than one format of the book. Below are photographs of the "Easy Reader" edition:

This format is 8.5" x 7" which is very approachable and makes all of the technical information easy to digest - it's a fun read! The other format will be part of a "Teacher's Survival Kit" that is in development. This format will be a standard 8.5" x 11" design and will include additional material for the classroom. We plan to develop this with the next version of the book. We are in discussions with the author, James Simmons, on what to include in the next edition and we are excited about it - creating the final designer version of the book itself would make a very interesting chapter indeed! Speaking of which, we are releasing our PDFs today so anyone can download and enjoy them ...

    → Easy Reader Print - (8.5" x 7")
    → Easy Reader Online - (8.5" x 11", with bookmarks)

The Easy Reader Online Edition includes bookmarks for enhanced navigation. We use a program called PrinceXML to generate our PDFs, and the online version includes a watermark on the first page that links to the website. It is a great program, and we were able to create our final "page proofs" of the book in the free version - we highly recommend it.

At last, the collaborative book we set out to create at the beginning of this summer is finally a reality! It was a real team effort by everyone involved - each individual played a vital role in its development, and the end product is a rewarding thing to behold. For everyone expecting their print copy - keep an eye on your mailbox next week!

Greetings Kickstarter Backers!

We are happy to announce that the alpha edition of "E-Book Enlightenment" is scheduled to ship next week. Our goal is Wednesday October 6th, with a "drop-dead ship date" of Friday October 8 :-).

We have been finessing our XHTML -> PDF conversion and now have a fully navigable e-book complete with a Table of Contents and bookmarks! Several of you chose a snapshot of the working code, however we will be including the e-book version with every copy of "E-Book Enlightenment" that ships to our kind Kickstarter backers. Naturally, we will make the enhanced electronic edition available to everyone at our website!

We are releasing this as an "alpha version" - we have more features planned and will be refining the design, and have been discussing future editions with author James Simmons. We will keep each of you who chose the book as a reward informed on developments of future releases.

Thanks again for supporting the Rural Design Collective!

We're almost ready to generate the final PDFs for our custom-designed version of "Ebook Enlightenment" at #rdcHQ - we still have a few finishing touches to put on our XHTML files, such as fine-tuning page breaks and some typographical nuances - but we are getting very close! A sample page is below:

You can take a peek at our XHTML files (still being tweaked!) and learn more about our process at our web site ... Go #rdcHQ

Greetings, Kickstarter Backers!

We are getting ready for the homestretch at the Rural Design Collective to produce our custom-designed eBook. We have been warming up our binding equipment with a few other bookish projects, and plan to ship "E-book Enlightenment" on September 30th! We will be contacting each of our backers individually for shipping information. Thank you for your support of the Rural Design Collective Summer Mentoring Program! You helped advance our program through your contribution, as well as the careers of two young talented artists.

Each year we look for potential projects that are compatible with our mission and provide our mentees with the opportunity to learn skills in their area of interest. If you know of future projects that would be of interest to us, please contact us! You can read more about our program and our mission at http://sixes.net/rdcHQ/about/ and http://sixes.net/rdcHQ/rdc-ui-lab/

For those of you who chose our poster as a reward, we are happy to announce that we have updated our mural image with the members of the 2010 Rural Design Collective crew!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! The crew has been busy working on a couple of fun Extra Credit collaborative art projects after a wonderful art show opening (more on this soon) to bring a fitting close to a wonderful summer of work!

Oceana was invited by James Simmons to present a new cover concept for his first book, "Make Your Own Sugar Activities," due to her great work on "Ebook Enlightenment." She gave it a unique look of its own, combining it with iconic visuals that are generally associated with the XO and other FLOSS Manual covers:
We have also been working on a new design for author Howard Rheingold for his book "How To Paint Your Shoes." The cover made its debut at the Songlines art show at Point.B Studio last Labor Day Weekend:

We had such a great time making art together this summer, we think we might have one last event when we produce our custom-designed version of "Ebook Enlightenment" for our Kickstarter backers at the end of the month ... Stay tuned!

Greetings!

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we are working towards an end-of-the-month shipping date for our Backer Rewards. The plan is to have a content freeze on September 15th on "Ebook Enlightenment," and at that point we will produce our custom-designed version of the book. Details are in the works for a virtual book signing with author James Simmons - we will post more information very soon!

Thank you so much for supporting the Rural Design Collective!

We have been doing a lot of work on the best approach to ePub -> PDF conversion at #rdcHQ. Christopher has been working with Booki, a web site that promises to be the future of collaborative book publishing. It provides powerful tools that enable anyone to create an eBook in a wiki environment.

Booki is developed by many of the same folks behind FLOSS Manuals, so a lot of the features are familiar, but far more robust. One of the most powerful features of Booki is OBJAVI, a PDF publisher, that will import any work on the Booki/FLOSS Manuals network and generate a PDF for print and online viewing. OBJAVI enables you to select from a range of standard publishing formats, set your margins, and publish the book according to your very own custom-designed Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).

Here is a screenshot on the Macintosh:
And another on Windows Vista, showing the custom CSS pane:

Our goal is to produce our final book in this paradigm. There are a lot of design issues to consider, and we have been looking at other tools that may give us greater control over certain design elements (primarily PrinceXML). We know that beautiful books can be published with Booki (we have seen one in particular) - but the technical nature of our material poses certain challenges. We are working on our final production timeline with author James Simmons, and we have decided to give ourselves until the end of September to make our collaborative book all that it can be!

As we like to say at #rdcHQ ... Stay Tuned!

Oceana chose her license at #rdcHQ yesterday - she selected a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, and we walked through the procedure of registering a work at the Creative Commons website. The illustrations that she created will be available for download here - we are still putting some finishing touches on them at #rdcHQ, and exporting them for both web and print use.

You can read more at our web site ...

It was an educational and fun Hacker Wednesday at #rdcHQ this week! The crew viewed "Sita Sings The Blues" (SSTB) by Nina Paley on the big screen as an introduction into matters of copyright, licenses and fair use. "SSTB" is a landmark work, bringing to the forefront many issues that are critical to creativity in the modern age. Nina's creator-endorsed logo for QuestionCopyright.org was also discussed. The logo is a symbol that a distributor can use to indicate that a work is distributed in a way that its creator endorses.

During the intermission, we reviewed the various types of open source licenses as they apply to our eBook project. FLOSS Manuals is currently licensed under GPL II, which is a holistic license generally associated with software releases. Creative Commons licenses are more suited to creative content (which is relevant to artists like Oceana and Christopher) and have the potential for a more granular level of control (many file-sharing sites support CC licenses on a per-object basis), so we reviewed those in-depth and watched an introductory video to introduce the concept.

The license deeds were distributed to all for review, and final copyright determination will be made next week. This experience sparked interesting discussions, and we have questions for the FLOSS Manuals team that we will be posting to their discuss mailing list over the coming days - next week, we get down to the business of making books!

(There are still a few days left in our funding program, so if you know anyone who wants to support a group of talented, self-motivated, hard-working artists who love to create and share what they learn ... please send them our Kickstarter fundraising page --> http://kck.st/b9Fzl9 ... Thank you for your support :-)

SSTB at RDC Headquarters shown below ... movie posters printed by Point.B Studio (featuring Nina's creator-endorsed mark!)