[TAG] LG - what's next?

[Henry Grebler]

Hi All,


[If you don't have time for a long read, put this away for later - or
never.]

-->I hoped to see more responses to the call for volunteers by now.
-->
-->I will of course do what I can, any one else? What does that leave us
-->with at this point for volunteers?

I've gone through the emails on this subject. Here's a summary of who
offered to do what. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rares Aioanei
	... I want to help LG as I did until now and hopefully more.

	Given enough free time, I wanna offer my help in any way I
	can.

Joey Prestia
	I will of course do what I can, ...

Rene Pfeiffer
	I am willing to write articles and help with the editing.

	We need at least two or three persons who take the lead and
	keep an eye on tasks. I may contribute some resources from
	other projects as well, but I will do this only if not doing
	this alone.

	If we can't manage to assemble a team until the end of June
	2011, then we should archive LG and move on.

	I am willing to take over one third of the coordination or be
	one of three coordinators.

Steve Brown
	... I can help, but it will be no better than patchy
	... I cannot commit to being around at the end of any given
	month.

	I will volunteer also [coordination] (though I do not know the
	way ...). 

Ben Okopnik
	... whatever expertise I've gained in my time as EiC.
	... staff and technical expertise.

Arslan Farooq
	OK, I am willing to volunteer as proofreader.

Nicodemo Alvaro
	I am interested in volunteering as a proof-reader.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've probably missed a whole lot of people and stuff, but I guess the
above is a start.

To this list I'll add myself:

Henry Grebler
	proofreading
	coordinating
	willing to write articles

Obviously, I can't let my volunteering pass without comment. I'm going
to do a much better job of proofreading if I get articles earlier in
the cycle rather than later. I guess what I'm doing now counts as
coordinating; I'm not sure what other tasks are required in
coordinating. Basically I put up my hand to satisfy Rene's request for
3 coordinators.

In the final analysis, the only thing I really really want to do is
write articles.


I've just realised that there's one more thing that I'm very happy to
do. Call it style guidance.

	The 3 dictionaries I consider relevant (Cambridge, Oxford,
	Merriam-Webster) all agree on "proofread" without hyphen. As
	far as I'm concerned, you can spell how you like if it's
	reasonable, but if you want to know what is the "house"
	preference, this is the answer.


I guess 8 people working together should be able to do a lot of work.

So here's the above list turned the other way, ie by task.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
proofreading

	Arslan Farooq
	Nicodemo Alvaro
	Henry Grebler

editing

	Rene Pfeiffer


coordinating

	Rene Pfeiffer
	Steve Brown
	Henry Grebler

staff and technical

	Ben Okopnik

other

	Rares Aioanei
	Joey Prestia

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above list is perhaps a little unrepresentative. A number of
people offered to help in unspecified ways. I've put them under
"other". Perhaps I should know what these people have done in the
past.


Here are some tasks which no one seems to have mentioned.

Article acceptance (editor)

	Someone has to decide if an article is fit to print. Without
	this, whatever is published will not maintain the high
	standards set by Ben in the past.

	I'm know there are some high quality blogs. But there is also
	a lot of material that would fail on matters of quality,
	accuracy and relevance. (These are some of the reasons why Ben
	has sent my articles back to me - and rightly so.)

Technical review

	check that the tech bits are valid.

Formatting

	Some articles arrive as HTML, some don't. Those that don't
	need to be formatted.


The above (along with proofreading) are tasks which can and should be
performed on each article as it comes in. They can be considered
asynchronous to publication. In some ways, they are asynchronous to
each other with some obvious exceptions (there's not much point
proofreading a rejected article). If an article goes through some
transformation, then it should be proofread again; so it makes sense to
format before proofreading.

Articles which have been through these steps go into a pool pending
publication.

Here are the monthly (or per issue) tasks:


Select a number of articles

	Somebody has to decide which articles will be published in
	this issue. (I'm trying to avoid creating an equivalence
	between "issue" and "month". LG has been published monthly in
	the past and it would be great if it were published monthly in
	future. But better to be published less frequently than not at
	all.)


Publish

	This is the mechanical or automated process of converting a
	number of articles to produce what we think of as an issue of
	LG.

	I guess to do it right, the process ought to involve a "trial"
	publication (so it's on a web site somewhere, but not
	generally visible), and a prepublication check (proofreading)
	that the issue as a whole looks ok.

	Then the final act of publication is just some manipulation of
	links.


And, of course, I haven't even mentioned the elephant.


Cheers,
Henry