The Origami Forum

Is there any other way to put the photos and text in a file besides Inkscape? Because whenever I try to download Inkscape, and error message pops up and shuts down Internet Explorer.

Many many many ways, for example Microsoft Word.

In case someone is interested, here is some data about the Christmas
Origamibook:

32 Authors have sent in a total of 49 Models, five of them as Crease
Patterns. The finished book contains 149 pages and is 24MB in size.

Merry Christmas

Thanks for doing this, Anna. You rock.

I second that Anna rocks!!!

So this book is not available to anyone else but the participants? Maybe it's my background as a computer programmer and open source fan, but somehow that seems wrong to me.

If it's just the hosting, i could do that for you. From what i read so far, there has gone to much work into this, to keep it from the public.

Making the book open to the public would be wrong, because it goes against the main idea of this book: People give something and get a lot in return for it.

If the book would be made public now there would be far less participants next time thinking along the lines of "Well, I just need to wait like a month and I'll get the book without doing anything, so why should I bother to draw diagrams."

Also making the book available for money wouldn't work well because the money would have to be distributed equally among the participants and that's just too much of administrative overhead.

You have some valid points there. I agree on the point, that giving it away for money would be a bad idea. I don't know how professional the book is made, but every customer who pays money (even a nominal fee) expect some quality and maybe even support. Disappointing some people would be inevitable.

Also, looking back and reading all the postings make it clear to me, that releasing this particular book would be a problem. Primary due to the fact, that everyone who was involved with it would have to agree. Persuading all of them would seem impossible to me, even if my idea is good.

Nevertheless i would like to encourage everyone in considering the idea of free content. It's a principle working inside the open-source community for years and imho worth a try. Sadly, my skills are not high enough (yet) to invent models myself. But i can offer everyone who is willing to create diagrams with some quality my skills in homepage design and image processing. I.e. i could make some clean computer graphics out of your hand drawn diagrams or step-by-step photos. I have also access to a web server with fairly high bandwidth and virtually no traffic limit.

Oh, and one last point. Also most of the diagrams i found throughout the web have a copyright and a name on it, i would strongly recommend the usage of a license, which states what is allowed and what isn't. Since doing that yourself without have some degree in law is almost impossible i would recommend http://creativecommons.org/ which is a great site where you can state in normal, understandable language what you want to allow others, and what you don't want them to do with your work. They will then chose the right CC-License for you, which is legal proof without any loopholes. These license texts are available via a fairly compact URL and come in both a normal, readable and a legal form. They are also translated into many common languages.


Hm, i don't think i stayed on topic. Maybe i should make an own topic for this. Also i would like to point out, that English is not my first language, so i might have done some mistakes which make the text hard to read. Also i don't want to offend anyone but merely exchange some ideas about this, because i think it's worth some thought.

On the other hand, Anna has made it okay for the individual contributors to make their diagrams available elsewhere after the end of January.

So it'll be up to the contributors if they choose to share their work later this year.

FYI, several origami bloggers have already been using the CC liscence, oschene in particular (he's the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are others); and nobody really worries about that, very few of us actually make money with origami, and therefore we don't hav any reason to keep anything from anybody unless it's been published (as was Anna's Book, or any other book).

Daydreamer wrote:Making the book open to the public would be wrong, because it goes against the main idea of this book

Isn't it called the "Christmas Origamibook"?
It will be a sad Christmas when only the elite can participate.

I understand how it works, give a little & get some more back, but...
It almost sounds like personal diagrams are money, and people with no money to buy a gift will not get a gift in return. When I think of the book title and the spirit of the holiday it represents, it would seem a shame that everyone not fortunate enough to have created their own design are left out.

Maybe it is too late for this project, but I would like to suggest for future projects that we remember how rare origami is. There is a very small portion of humans doing origami, to close off the world from designs that potentially will never surface elsewhere would be a great loss to the artform and future generations.

One thing that seems to be fare to those who contribute is some kind of time restraint on the release for those who do not contribute. Let them play with it for a few months then let everyone try.

thedeadsmellbad wrote:One thing that seems to be fare to those who contribute is some kind of time restraint on the release for those who do not contribute. Let them play with it for a few months then let everyone try.

Well, that's the way it is now, except not for the whole book.
Everyone who supplied a diagram for the book can decide for themselves if they want to publish the diagram elsewhere starting from February 1st.

This was such a great idea! Great job Anna, thanks . Had you thought of doing the same thing next year? I imagine it is a lot of work to put something like this together but it would be so awesome. That way i could get started right away and cook up a better diagram for next year.

Isn't it called the "Christmas Origamibook"?
It will be a sad Christmas when only the elite can participate.

Well, i participated, and compared with a most of people on the forum i wouldn't consider myself elite!

Rdude

Yes, I thought on doing the same thing next year. I got many positive feedback and a lot of people wrote that they would like to participate again, so I think this could become an annual event

Sweet! That is awsome!

Rdude