All, I am pleased to announce that we have a new Acting Managing Editor: David Marshall. He is a retired law professor, publisher, technologist, and author, from the U.K. but now living in Singapore. (No relation to the other David Marshall of Singapore that you can read about on Wikipedia.) He brings a combination of skills/expertise that I think will prove extremely useful to us. Just as important, he has both the time--at least for the period of the pilot project, as he has family responsibilities to think of--and the drive to help us get this thing off the ground.
He has been advising me on legal issues as well as managerial issues. I've enjoyed David's straightforward and very sensible advice, and I believe we share the same vision for where the Citizendium should be heading. So I'm quite happy he's agreed to join us, at least for a time. Anyway, I'll let him introduce himself next. I can also now let the news out that our Acting Chief Constable is Ruth Ifcher. She was Chief Copyeditor for Nupedia, one of the original Wikipedia participants, and one of the *very* few original people who is *still* on Wikipedia (last I heard anyway). She has advanced degrees in linguistics and mathematics, subjects she has taught at CUNY and Columbia, and is employed as a programmer. (I think I have all that right--that's from memory.) I always greatly enjoyed working with her. Like David, she is "of a certain age" and brings an enormous amount of experience and common sense to the table. I know her as both no-nonsense and very fair-minded: exactly the combination of qualities for a good Constable. Unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to get to know every new participant the way I have gotten to know Mrs. Ifcher. Phil Wardle (Citizendium-L moderator) and Mike Johnson (who wrote the "Modern Dragons" blog article about Citizendium) have both agreed to be constables who will do double duty as "personnel administrators." While I, David, and Mrs. Ifcher will be making decisions about applications, Phil and Mike will probably be actually sending out the replies; we might have to bring another person on board, but we'll see about that. Hopefully, the five of us will be able to get through over 200 applications (and still growing) that have arrived. Probably, the most recent applicants will take longer to get to--if you applied in the last few days, I wouldn't expect a reply in the next week, but who knows? By the way, all of the people mentioned above are part of the ad hoc steering committee. We'll all be working to get the wiki configured and set up over the next 4-7 days. When we've arrived at a minimal measure of order and readiness, we'll start bringing at least *many* of the hundreds of people who have applied. We will not be bringing on board people who have not given us any information about themselves, by the way; please do see http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html In the meantime, I'd like this crew to reply to the applicants as soon as possible. The oldest applications (from last week) should receive replies this week, anyway, or if I can cajole a set of volunteers into doing that, they will. :-) With volunteers, you can't really set deadlines, you know. :-) You merely cajole and excite. By the way, I'd also like to get a Certain Person on the Technical Lead Group if he's willing, but darn it, mail to him keeps bouncing. Please whitelist [EMAIL PROTECTED] :-) By the way, Citizendium-L list membership is up to 390 as of this writing...oops, make that 391... --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
