Today marks my 10 year “DP birthday”, as we like to say on the site. 10 years ago I joined Distributed Proofreaders and proofread a few pages. Turns out they needed developers more than proofreaders, the former being harder to find, and I was encouraged to dip my toes into the code. It wasn’t long before I was working with jmdyck, one of the lead developers, rewriting the spellcheck function into WordCheck.1 Thus began my foray into a development style best summed up by the phrase “development by community”.
My involvement with DP has waxed and waned over the years as my free time fluctuated, but I’ve always loved DP’s mission and the great community of people. Despite being a world-wide organization and very geographically dispersed I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several of them in person – all of whom have been delightful people.
Today I am one of the main developers working to improve our code. I periodically wear a system admin hat (a role we affectionately call ‘squirrels’) helping to keep our site running. Recently I was elected by the community to serve on the umbrella organization’s governing board where I am the board president.
If you love ebooks, believe public domain materials should be free and widely available, and need an outlet for a bit of OCD, I would encourage you to drop over to pgdp.net and join a wonderful community of people helping to preserve history one page at a time.
1 Not surprisingly, you’re really more interested in having the text of the page you’re transcribing match the image and be consistent throughout the book, not knowing how they spelled a word in 1892 differs from the contents of a modern dictionary.
Digital Ramblings 