Author Spotlight: Catching Up with Keith Basil
At Book Sprints, we have the immense privilege of working with many brilliant minds. We partner with well-decorated authors and organizations who are changemakers in their respective fields. Today we shine the author spotlight on Keith Basil, current General Manager of the Edge Business Unit at SUSE.
Keith joined us for two Book Sprints as part of Red Hat, one in 2013 and one in 2020. Back in 2013, he and a group of authors from HP, Intel, the NSA, and Red Hat wrote the OpenStack Security Guide. You can read more about that Book Sprint here.
Keith (leftmost) working with colleagues in the 2013 Book Sprint.
Even more notably, seven years later, Keith was part of the pioneering group of Red Hatters who took on the challenge of the first ever completely virtual Book Sprint. In the face of a global pandemic and shifting lockdowns, he rallied a team of authors to participate in collaborative knowledge production virtually. He was well-aware of the rigor and challenge of an onsite Book Sprint, never mind a virtual one. His trust in the Red Hat team helped push the Book Sprint through into a published book. The book hit #1 in new releases and #4 overall in the System Administration category on Amazon early on in its release!
“It was a great experience and I was able to use the material globally,” Keith shared with us in our catch up just a few weeks ago. He was also able to write a fantastic blog post on his 2020 Book Sprint experience with a thorough evaluation of the Book Sprint process and its elements – check it out here.
The book produced in this 2020 Book Sprint with the Red Hat team was OpenShift Security Guide. Its goal was to be an authoritative source of “strong and relevant documentation” to allow “cross-functional teams to leverage product knowledge.”
“Let me just say that the Book Sprint facilitation team is awesome. The Book Sprint team introduced a handful of tools and techniques that enhanced the order, efficiency and openness of the entire project.” Keith Basil, LinkedIn Blog Post
Keith created a wonderful flowchart outlining how all these tools and techniques related to each other, including Mural, Google Suite, Slack, and Figma.
We appreciate the trust in our facilitation and process! Keith is also able to highlight one of our favorite parts of the Book Sprint process: that it is a partnership among all the people in the room (whether onsite or virtual) – from our facilitator to the authors to the book production team of editors and illustrators. It is through this true collaborative spirit that our Book Sprints come to life, and we’re glad to have had Keith twice in our sprints to share that magic with us!
We look forward to more opportunities to collaborate again with Keith and like-minded individuals and groups! If you have a collaborative knowledge project coming up, you might want to check out a Book Sprint with us. Reach out to us at contact@booksprints.net to get started.