About this book

This is a sort of Foreward that describes the "shape" we want the book to take (a Plan of the Work so to speak). This will also sum up how we want people to interact, what relevant business models might be, and so forth and so on. It could take a while to get this right! - luckily we now have an outline of material to work with.

=Shape of the book=

We currently seem to have 2 parts - a "theory" part (Motivating discussion, Five principles, Interviews, Theory); and a "practice" part (Practice, Case studies). The "practice" part is still philosophical and abstract, and may not yet be as practical as it should be. Both parts need revision. Indeed, the "Practice" section might be suitable to revise into a submission to this call about "Baudrillard and Politics" from the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (a high-level open access journal in continental philosophy). On the other hand, writing continental philosophy isn't necessarily the best way to make the ideas accessible to the general public. In any case, the second part of the book will likely be revised heavily after I've read Baudrillard's "Mirror of Production"!

Right now the book is also very "non-fiction", though we are inspired by long fiction of David Foster Wallace and Socratic dialogs. We might want to change the book, or parts of the book, so that it reads more as a "dialog".

=Revision plans=

In particular, we need to engage more deeply with the works we cite. And we need to make things "flow" better (the draft was authored as separate essays - will it work as one book?). It would be good to find a friendly critic or two who would be willing to read the entire book and comment on things "inline". For starters, we can play this role.

Using Etherpad would likely make editing easier, but it doesn't currently integrate with Mediawiki.

=Publication models=


 * Online publication on Mediawiki, licensed via CCZero (this wiki)
 * A "living" book published via Etherpad and open for editing
 * A short ebook of the first "snapshot" (e.g. Kindle and/or PDF)
 * 40K, make a "1 hour read" (or two of these, one for each part), see http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/09/italy-40k-books-no-paper-no-problem/
 * Lulu, see for example http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/the-real-apology-of-socrates/4358757
 * A short paper book (probably around 130 to 180 pages)

=Interaction models=


 * Throw contents of book into Etherpad and have an editing party.
 * Invite selected peers to add to paragogy.net
 * Modify paragogy.net to run something less like a wiki and more like a CMS (e.g. a site based on Drupal+Etherpad, like Planetary)

=Business models=


 * Create a "marketplace" (agora) along the lines described in this article on the Free Technology Academy's wiki about a "Free Software Guild"; see also Sole Proprietorship
 * Build a paragogical high school curriculum (like the International Baccalaureate programme) and start an online and/or charter school that pilots this curriculum
 * Create a plugin that works with e.g. Amazon but that crowdsources more critical reviews about products - contributors gain referral bonuses and paragogy.net takes 5%. (Researching products could be part of the paragogical curriculum.)