[Leica] FOM 2 phase 2

[Alastair Firkin <AlastairF@bhs.grampianshealth.org.au>]

Dear Friends, 

It is with great pleasure that I now move FOM 2 into phase 2 (phase 3 will
be accepting your work for exhibit). We now have 100 registrants, and this
is more than enough to continue. Firstly, I must thank on behalf of all of
us our friend, whose birthday it is today, Stan Stanowy. He has been working
with me to upgrade the homepage, and we are now working on the creation of
forms and a database, to allow you to submit work. 

So phase 2. I would like to call for volunteers for 2 types of job.

1. I'm looking for multilingual talent, to translate the aims and conditions
of our project into other languages, so that I can put this information up
on the site. I have a good friend NK who I'm sure I can talk into doing
Japanese, and hosting the Japanese text on his site (as mine does not host
this option) Chinese will undoubtedly have the same problems -- any takers.
Stan will be "forced" into doing Polish, but we need the "gamut" of other
languages. I am hoping to make a list of these talented LUGGERS, so that
people can contact them via e-Mail from the web site, for help in joining
the LUG or submitting images.

2. I'm looking for web space, and people to help us fill it. Ideally, I
would like to recruit people to cover areas of the globe, accept images,
make sure they are the correctly named formated/sized etc and put them on a
fast and reliable web server. The URL can then be given to the photographer
involved, who will submit (hopefully via a form on the home page, but till
then via e-mail) the details to me, and I will link the exhibition to the
URL. I thought we could start with one person 

on the east coast of USA to do east of the middle ;-) and Sth America
on the west coast of USA to do west of the middle and Canada
west Europe/UK 
[these 3 will probably be the busiest, so there will probably need to be
some rotation of duties during the project]

east Europe/Russia
Asia and the subcontinent
Australasia/pacific/Africa

I will of course nominate for the last position. Now I would also be very
happy to find someone who can supply a fast reliable server for the entire
project to sit on. It would need to be accessible via remote control by
myself and Stan. I'm looking at options here in Australia, and I suspect I
will eventually come up with one, but if someone out there has  a "perfect"
solution let me know. Till then, the use of multiple sites storing images
and one central URL site would seem to be the fastest and best solution.

At this stage, I do not believe we really need to have a list of people
prepared to scan images, but if you want to put yourself up for this job,
then we can. There are so many options for getting images digitised
commercially, that this is probably too "generous". I would hope that those
involved as the above helpers will also offer advise on scanning etc, but
perhaps someone would like to act as digitiser guru, and point people to
commercial options.

thanks again for getting involved. Please send your offers of assistance to
me at 

firkin@netconnect.com.au

Cheers

Alastair