On Jan. 10, Sebastian Blondeel wrote:
On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:55:28PM -0800, steve harris wrote:
While one important issue is the post-proofing bottleneck in DP (which is being given attention), as important but more fundamental is whether
Can you give details about this bottleneck issue?
There are about 2200 books in DP that have been proofed, but are in various stages of Post-porrfing processing. You can see the specifics at DP's Stats Central.
On the other hand, it would be difficult to set up an official editorial board: of course it should not be too bureaucratic and complicated, of course it should not have a monopoly of the books proposed to PGDP (PMs would still be free to kick in books they just like, keeping in mind they will delay the more "important" books. We work in limited resources, so we should define priorities).
I don't support the need for an 'official editorial board', certainly not a group to exclude one work or another. At the same time, I think it would help if there was a group/process that gathered a list of works we would encourage people to work on. I did my own for the past two years at www.steveharris.net/PGList.htm .
But above all we are missing the competent people: I guess a bunch of University professors specialized in pre-XXth century literature, history, philosophy etc. would do, but how many of those know PG? (If you don't like scholars because they tend to be non pragmatic and argue about pointless details, replace that with: essay writers, journalists, whoever is important in the "culture" of the language considered).
I think it would be a great set of projects if someone wanted to contact the MLA or American historical Association or other group and worked with them on generating a list of key works in each area. It's the sort of contact that could lead to greater uses of the PG collection, as well. More broadly, PG has focused on copyright-production-posting segments. A more robust view extending to both text collection and distribution/use of the materials would be a good way to be more effective in our core functions as well as extend the scope and usefulness of our product. I also think it would be useful if PG were to have enough management that such efforts could be endorsed and facilitated, not just left to people working on their own. To me, the open source coding groups, like the apache foundation or mozilla are useful non-coercive organizational models. Thx, smh