On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 20:20, Sam Halliday wrote:
how did you find out about out project? we are interested to see
what is effective at getting new recruits.
Well, I may have heard of it before, but seeing your signature on
abiword-user reminded me of it.
(I'm AbiWord lead QA, maintainer, and do occasional odd jobs like doc
writing when I find time)
Perhaps you can start an email signature campaign (-:
the book itself is written in LaTeX, and since there are many
authors, we keep the book centralised and synchronised using CVS on
the GNU savannah server:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=fhsst
Okay.
we are currently thinking up a list of lots of things that people
like yourself could be involved in... please elaborate on your
skills so that i can see what is best suited: for example, could you
please tell me your level of understanding of the following:
- using CVS
All the time, no big deal at all. Though I imagine a lot of potential
recruits wouldnt have the dev background.
- editing LaTeX files
Eh, not so strong on this. Can I do it from LyX?
- education level of the sciences/maths
Informal but university-level (lower division) studies of computer
science and physics (and more on some other subjects that aren't
really relevant to this project), enough math to back up the former
two (though I would not assert myself a mathematician). By informal,
I mean learning in laboratories and studying individual topics as
needed, I had some somewhat unique jobs where I was trained in these
things. As it happens, I'll be returning back to a university next
fall to pursue a'formal' physics education toward my masters.
- geographical location
Eh, that has a tendancy to change frequently. But I spend most of my
time in the United States.
- graphics (making posters etc)
Not much of an artist, sorry.
- printing press access: i.e. practical stuff
Not really )-:
well, if you want to contribute content, then the best thing to do
is to checkout the latest CVS, edit a file and send either myself,
mark, spencer or the mailing list a patch (or your edited file).
Alrighty. No promises, but I'll try to look at it next week.
we have not had any foreign language contributors, as of yet, and
the book is too young for us to be considering a translation... but
thanks for the offer anyway.
Just a thought.
you say you would be interested in editing? what do you mean by
that? like, as a proof reader kind of thing? if thats the case...
then i suppose we are always welcome to hear feedback. i suppose
only on the physics chapters at this stage however as maths/chem/bio
is really early days.
Editing as in proof reading, or simply reading things over and
conferring with the author on passages which come across to me as
'awkward' or overly [dense/simple/brief/verbose]. In my experience,
it rarely hurts to have another set of eyes so that I can say 'I wrote
_that_? What was I thinking? I never noticed that... How would you
word it?' etc.
Having not seen the content yet, I don't know whether I have anything
useful to add or not, that remains to be seen.
Who knows, if after exposing myself to the nature of the text and
what's already laid down I don't really find much to do there, I may
work up the cajonés to actually write new sections. That depends
mostly on my free time.
if you were to become a regular contributor, we would of course
consider you for write access to the CVS source.
What?! You don't take _my_ word as that of <insert deity here>?!
Blasphemy! You think you can moderate _me_? I'll DoS the lot of ya!
(just being facetious, of course you wouldn't priv someone without a
line of code^Wtext)
Just out of curiosity, how do the stats look with regard to
contributors, distribution of content portions and who does what? Are
there a lot of occasional contributors, does most of it come from a
few people, are some subtopics treated more heavily than others?
Regards
-M