[Textop-en-phil] Volunteers desired

[Larry Sanger]

All,

You might not have noticed item #4 in yesterday's mail: I'm looking for
volunteers.  Two people have responded encouragingly, but I was hoping for
more interest.  So let me reiterate.

If you really are interested in joining in, now's the time: I want to get us
actually doing some work on the wiki.  I myself am doing work every day on
the wiki.  So please write me and (if I don't already know about you) tell
me about yourself, and we'll arrange a time to talk, determine some goals,
and get you started.

I hope it's obvious that this *does not* mean that you're going to be
*committed* to doing anything.  I just want you to get *started*, that's
all; if you stick with it, grand.  If not, that's too bad, but I'll be
grateful for what whatever you contribute.  If you do hours of work every
day, I'll be stunned.  If you do 15 minutes of work a day, I'll be very
pleased.  But we do have to get a pilot project started or I fear we'll
never get this extremely worthy enterprise off the ground.

One person--not a philosopher, actually--simply asked what she could do, and
I had 4-5 personal tailor-made suggestions for her.  I plan to follow-up
(although the ball's in her court now!) with discussion, explanation, etc.,
as necessary.

I've gotten groups of people together to interact and work online before,
you know, many times since 1994 or so.  I know that the first push to get
things moving is the hardest.  I know that, while some people just really
are too busy to do anything just now (I totally understsand), many others
just need an extra push.  Once people start working together and
interacting, it's really all downhill from there; then people support each
other, and create interest in and add value to each others' work, and it
gets fun.

What's particularly exciting about *this* project, to my mind at least, is
that this project really has a revolutionary potential.  I think more and
more of us will see that and come to agree with that assessment as we do
more actual work on the outline; the work itself really will open your eyes,
I think, about the potential of this project.

--Larry

BTW one thing you might volunteer to do is, rather than actually adding new
content, review and improve what content is already there.  Just to take one
instance, if you look at
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Insanity_%28or_%22madness%22%29 ,
you'll see several issues.  Probably, that one chunk needs to be divided
into two or three, and given summaries.  Also, you might want to discuss the
issues involved in naming of nodes here...that would be very welcome.  Such
work and discussion would help us expand and settle on better project
policies.