To the many wonderful souls who have so far volunteered to help A List Apart, thank you very, very much for your emails! And if you haven’t heard back from us yet, please excuse the delay. We’ve been inundated with messages from hundreds of potential volunteers across a wide spectrum of disciplines and potential task groups, and we are going through your messages slowly and carefully, responding personally to each one.
Some of you have written asking if we might be interested in having you write for us. Gosh, A List Apart has always welcomed articles from our community. Guidelines (plus how to submit your first draft, proposal, or outline) are available at alistapart.com/about/contribute. Please check them out—we’d love to look at any topically appropriate article you care to submit.
But writing articles is far from the only way to support and make your mark at the new (19-year-old) ALA.
Meet the groups!#section2
If you’ve expressed an interested in organizing or hosting an ALA-themed monthly meet-up, or have other ideas that can help grow community, we’ll invite you to join our newly forming COMMUNITY group. If EDUCATION AND OUTREACH is more your thing, we are starting a group for that, as well. There are other groups to come, as well—a list of our ideas appears in the original post on the topic, and there may be more groups to come.
How these groups will work, and what they will do, is largely going to be determined by the volunteers themselves. (That’s you folks.)
As we’re starting the work of supporting and organizing these groups on Basecamp, you can’t just add yourself to a group, as you could on, say, Slack. But that’s okay, because we want to approach this somewhat methodically, adding people a few at a time, and having little written conversations with you beforehand.
Our fear was that if we launched a bunch of Slack channels all at once, without speaking with each of you first, hundreds of people might add themselves the first day, but then nobody would have any direction as to what might be expected—and we might not have the resources ready to provide guidance and support.
By adding you to Basecamps a few at a time, and hopefully identifying leaders in each new group as it begins forming, we hope to provide a lightly structured environment where you can design your own adventures. It takes a little longer this way, but that’s by design. (A List Apart started in 1997 as a 16,000-member message board. Big open channels are great for letting everyone speak, but not necessarily the best way to organize fragile new projects.)
If you are interested in contributing to those projects, or curious about a particular area, and told us so in your initial email, we will eventually get to you and assign you to the right slot. If you haven’t yet volunteered, of course, you can still do so. (See the original post for details.)
Editors, developers, and designers#section3
But wait, there’s more. Developers: if you have standards-oriented front-end development experience and would like to help out on day-to-day site maintenance, occasional minor upgrades, and an eventual redesign, just add yourself to A List Apart’s Github front-end repo: github.com/alistapart/AListApart.
Those with backend experience (particularly in ExpressionEngine and WordPress), you will hear from us as we work our way through your emails.
Editor-in-chief Aaron Gustafson and I have also been going slowly through your mails looking for additional editorial help. We’ve already found and added a few very promising people to our volunteer editorial staff, and will introduce them to you soon. If you’re an editor and we haven’t added you yet, not to worry! It likely means we haven’t gotten to your email yet. (So. Much. Email!)
As might be expected, a majority of those who volunteered offered their services as designers, developers, or both. The number of emails we’ve received from folks with these skills is humbling, touching, and a bit overwhelming. We have not yet begun to dig through this particular pile of mail. So if you haven’t heard from us, that’s why. (But, as I just mentioned, if you’re a developer, you can add yourself to our front-end repo. So do that, if you wish, and say hi!)
We love you#section4
Hope this helps clarify what’s up. We are grateful for every single email we’ve gotten. We will eventually speak with you all. Thank you all again.
Jeffrey
I Like the conscious approach you guys are taking. Best of luck!