CiviCRM Manual - book from zero to published in 5-days
So the concept of getting locked in a cabin in the woods with 10 other civicrm users and developers to write a much needed manual from woe to go in 5-days was a fascinating one. And the experience lived up to the promise.
The location was Truckee California, the technology was Floss Manuals, our ‘guide’ was Adam Hyde - and the mission was a bit daunting.
After 5-days of hard slog, some very fine food and great company we hit ‘publish’ around 6pm on Friday (yes I know, I should have finished my chapter at 5pm Adam!) and the manual was immediately available as a free download PDF, and as a hard copy that can be purchased online.
So how does a booksprint work. Well, in our case, once we had divvied the book up in to chapters we all leapt in to the most relevant chapters, emptied our brains, passed it on to someone else, moved on somewhere else, came back to it later. In amongst this we argued about spelling (open source won the day and spelling was agnostic of UK or USA style English), we conferred on how exactly CiviCRM dealt with curly problems - and we laughed.
We even let some Joomla! folk participate 
Did it work - undoubtedly it did. There was no manual, then there was. The concept is brilliant. There are definitely some ways I think both the technology and the process can be tweaked to ensure that even more of our efforts were fruitful. There were occasions where we clearly had to much overlap across some chapters, and there were some gaps that we will have to go back and fill in.
In terms of process, hats off to Adam for steering us through. My preference in future would be to have a more layered map of what we are aiming for - the software really only let us frame it out at the Chapter level, and I think going down another two levels on the outline - and being able to view the output in such an outlined format - would be great.
And yes, I would use a mindmapping tool such as FreeMind to manage the content outlines because it gives so much flexibility and the ability to collapse and expand infinitely.
This manual will continue to evolve online, and updates will be frequent as we get back to fleshing out the weaker parts, or adding in new elements from future releases.
Hats off to my co-writers - a really enjoyable experience.