Hello, I'm now worried about Quarto vol.2: its release strongly. In my opinion we are better to release it within this month, if possible before March 15, the midst of this month.
Quarto is a newsletter from the foundation (hence from the board) and Quarto vol.2 is basically a report of the foundation and board activity in 2004/Q4. I like to read project reports and meetups but essentially they are additional parts in my understandings. We can put aside them. But quartery report should be provide in my opinion.
We are an international non-profit organisation and people support us substentially, therefore we should react to those support. And in my part the activity of the project like Wikipedia is not sufficient for such responsibility and visibility of the foundation. And I have no reason to let the relase of information on those issues delay no more. If we are waiting for the begining of 2005/Q2, we will be seemed to be idle, though I know many of translators have been working on it, such shadow work is always uncomprehensible from the outside.
Recently Sj and I talked about this issue and we reached to the conclusion some contributions to Quarto vol.2 could appear on vol.3. Now I propose we will release some edition including English, German, Japanese and French on March 15. But not the whole part of initial plan but the content as the below: *Whole part of pages 1-3 and 8 (Endnote, Angela's report on BBC visit) *Some part of page 4; (Project report) Local chapter reports, Wikinews reports, short report from some language projects, "Buon Natale" project report (it is a seasonal topic so can't be delay more) . Other stuffs will be reused on the "Spring" issue. *If possible, "In the Media" and "International": I think most of this part are translated already and we have no reason to save it to the next issues.
On the contrary the interview of Larry Lessig will appear in the next edition. I propose here some stuffs will appear only twice a year to reduce the task of volunteer translators. In current situation there are too many stuffs. Since we have no right to assign translation task to each community nor certain translators, and curerntly we are not many in number, we should keep the task in a size we can manage. Or I think we can make a new media to provide project and community news and keep the newsletter much tighter in its shape. but it could be discussed in another chance.
I admit we should have take an action before, but I hope it is not too late. Of course ideally I would like to release the current version in eitht pages, but I assert it is unbearable now for our translator team, so it should be resized and we should provide the quartery report periodically - in my opinion in this situation no news is bad news. Core isseus should be reported even it will seem a bit less amused.
How do you think?