Community News - May 2002

Another month gone, another stack of accomplishments by the evolt.org community. As a reminder, this is open to anyone in the community, so if you missed a chance to toot your horn, add a comment, and watch for the announcement for next month's news.

Evoltspottings

All over the web, people are looking to see what evolters have to say, and sometimes they point their users back to the source. Here are some of the pointers, all noticed this month:

• A mention in Lockergnome, which boasts 250,000+ subscribers, for the browser archive.
• This article on Unifying the Online Presence of Decentralized Organizations, by Peter Merholz, points to Martin's You Need a Content Management System.
• The glasshaus book Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself hit the streets this month. If you buy it from Amazon.com with this link, evolt.org gets a nice affiliate kickback. Another book that hit, featuring evolt.org members Shirley Kaiser and Adrian Roselli as technical editors, is the title Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, also by glasshaus, and also available at Amazon.com.

Thanks to the many people who have taken the time to cite evolt.org in their own work

We're getting organized

Behind the scenes, evolt.org members have developed five groups, plus two other bodies, to help organize and run evolt.org. The five groups and their purposes are:

• Content
  Responsible, for editing and approving articles which appear on www.evolt.org, responding to emails that come through the site and day-to-day management of the evolt mailing lists.
• Development
  Responsible for the design and implementation of various projects.
• Finance
  Responsible for handling the money side of evolt.org. Fundraising efforts are jointly made with...
• Marketing
  Responsible for building and maintaining the evolt.org brand, and for managing all external relationships.
• Sysadmin
  Responsible for administering the evolt.org servers.

The Steering Committee, being organized now, will be made up of two members from each of the 5 groups. Its purpose is to help set goals for the groups, monitor progress, and solve disputes—should they arise—amongst the groups.

TheForum is a catch-all list for general communication between the different evolt.org committees, and for discussing non-committee-specific issues. Anyone can join TheForum, and we encourage your participation. If you have ideas for evolt.org, or can contribute even a little bit of time and energy into helping us thrive, we'd love to have you!

Help support evolt.org

We're now again able to accept monetary gifts through:

Our address for monetary gifts or giving inquiries is give@evolt.org. We will soon have a snail mail address (for checks, money orders, etc.).

We're looking for other on-line, commercial (in other words, not personal bank account), low-cost money transferring capabilities so that non-US residents may more easily help support evolt.org. Please write us if you know of any good commercial services in your country.

Here's more information on how to help support evolt.org. Thanks for your interest!

Beervolts

Frisbeervolt in Toronto

Thanks to a ColdFusion conference in Toronto, .jeff and nagrom worked their way up north to meet up with r937, Mishka, mwarden, sprocket, and aardvark. We started off, of course, with food followed up with sneaking into the CF North conference, and then a little more food. With rudy (r937) taking us on a wonderful frisbee golf outing to cap the night (he won, of course), it turned out to be a blast. Ideally, next time theglass floor won't fall out of the CN Tower and suck us all to our death. Um, yeah, anyway, there are photos of the weekend posted.

Beervolt London

The London evoltistas got together again - Mike, John, Megan, Martin and special non-evolt guest, Emily. We started out aboard a ship converted to a bar, then moved on to somewhere where we could get a drink in without queuing for 45 minutes.

Mike had the world's smallest and cheapest digital camera and took some photos.

Our members

Dan Cody (djc)

The spark that started evolt.org and led contributors to the community for much of its life so far has decided to discontinue his involvement in order to devote more time to his interests in Linux advocacy, public speaking, and other web projects. evolt.org members wish Dan Cody well in his future endeavours and thank him for his awesome contribution to the community.

Dan's initiation of the wonderful members.evolt.org service remains as one of his greatest contributions. Take some time to browse one of the 150+ tutorials or news pieces Dan had published in his time with evolt.org.

Paul Cowan

Paul made a respectable showing in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, although he's framed it a bit more frankly on his personal site.

Adrian Roselli (aardvark)

An interesting month all-around. The Algonquin Studios team, led by Adrian, went on to an overwhelming victory at the first ever Unreal Tournament Shoot-out. Soon to be a biannual event, competition for the next one will be tough, and his team is already marked for destruction by the others.

Adrian also co-wrote an article for Multilingual Computing & Technology magazine, titled A Merger of Content Management and Localization Workflow, detailing the merger with a localization firm and integrating a localization workflow into their QuantumCMS content management system.

Cayley Vos

Cayley is proud to announce a redesign of workskiff.com to improve navigation, improve brand recognition, and increase search engine traffic. The government is a significant client, so the design had to follow accepted standard usability features. You can compare the redesign with the original site.

Submissions

The evolt.org Monthly Recap is a summary of awards, meetings, and fresh opportunities relevant to all of us. Submitted items from month to month may be of varying relevance to others depending on the number of opportunities. The important thing, though, is that you can share more about yourself, and learn more about the people that make up the evolt.org Monthly Recap introductory article.

If you're proud of it, send it in. Don't be shy.

Please send all submissions via the contact form. Any queries or clarifications can be sent via the same method.