It's a bit early to say yet how well the changes at DP are working. People seem to be getting used to the new way of doing things and there have been many positive comments about separating formatting and proofing. We made two major changes at once, however, one being the move to 4 rounds, and the other being a restructuring of how we encourage our volunteers to work in the areas to which they are best suited. The effects on production of the second change have been far more pronounced. Bottlenecks are developing, as we expected, between some of the rounds. But, the material that gets through the process is of much higher quality and is making the jobs of the post-processors much easier. We are engaged in a giant experiment to see how best to manage this production process. It will probably take through the end of this year for us to get past the initial shakeup and into a smooth flow again. In the meantime, our wonderful, volunteer, developers have rewritten most of the code, making possible many features that people have requested. We have spiffy new graphics dressing up the site. Our community has survived wrenching change with its usual "can-do" spirit. PGDP really is a whole new site, though with the same goal as always: producing high quality ebooks to be made freely available via PG. JulietS DP site admin Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
speaking of production, how is the new system working over at d.p.?
for those who might not know, distributed proofreaders changed their system to have separate rounds for formatting and proofing, two rounds for each. the switchover was around the first of june. i haven't visited their forum-boards since then to see how it's going. does anyone have an update? is the new way of doing things working? have people gotten used to it yet? if so, do they prefer it over the old? have any new thoughts on the overall process emerged from the change?
eventually i will get back to the boards over there, but if anyone would like to comment in the meantime, people here might be curious to know.
-bowerbird