Esteemed Citizendians, (Someone came up with that, "Citizendian," which seems to fit, despite sounding like an alien race from a science fiction novel.)
OK, please keep this quiet for now, but I want to tell you what we're announcing next week, because we need to come together and get to work! But I must save the details for next week and the press release, or our PR consultant, the lovely Maggie, will kill me. Beginning next week: (1) As our next step toward public launch, we're going to make it possible to auto-register. Folks will be able to get to work on the wiki in a minute. Real names and bios will still be required, but "soft security" (look it up) is used. (2) We're going to start a recruitment drive. I'll be organizing this myself but will be needing many helpers, and if any able editor wants to put in the several hours per day this task will take in the early weeks, and can put up with me and my advice, I will be happy to hand over the job. I have far too much to do and NEED your help. (3) We're starting our first actual funding drive! YOU can contribute right now, in fact, here: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=15045 (4) We've joined with a "nonprofit incubator," to be announced next week. Hence we are now a legal nonprofit and can help ourselves to lots of opportunities that have come our way, only to be deferred after we became a legal nonprofit! We will be reporting a few grants... After a few more and/or a successful "pre-launch fundraiser," we'll be able to afford the servers and such needed to do a full public launch. Also, we'll be calling the pilot project a success. But we're now ready to expand aggressively, and will start working to do so, both by recruiting and by fundraising. Also, not in the press release: we've got a new logo (to be unveiled over the weekend, I believe); Sylvia Wolf has joined us as fundraiser; Jason Potkanski has joined us as a part-time technical contractor; and (as you already know) we are perhaps temporarily "unforking"--we're deleting unedited (inactive) Wikipedia articles. Folks can feel much freer to start their own versions of articles, and will be strongly encouraged to do so. So, let's get some substantial work in over the next week, please! May I ask for several (perhaps brief) new articles from you after noon, tomorrow, Eastern time? That's when the wiki will be "unforked," or blanked (except for the CZ Live articles)--and we can see how we like starting over, ourselves, from scratch. I'm pretty sure we're going to like it, but we'll see. I'm pumped! Let's go! :-) --Larry P.S. I plan to do a big perspectival blog post next week, explaining in more detail where I see us now and where I see us going in the next few months. The changes and developments are going to keep coming fast and furious, as they have been recently. _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list Citizendium-l@lists.purdue.edu https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
