Help Needed

The EMC is growing, changing, and being applied to new projects so rapidly these days that the handbook is struggling to keep up. Complete html documents like the description of the new RS274NGC interperter by Tom Kramer, etal. is a fantastic effort. We need people who can help bring the rest of these pages up to that standard.

Compile Person

First we need folk who can follow and compile information like that emailed to the emc@nist.gov and the CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO list. You can pick as narrow a topic as you would like to cover. As soon as you select a topic, email me, and we will put up a hot topics page for you that you can add to as you find material.

You ought to know a little something about the EMC, but do not need to know much at all about html, and nothing about ftp or cvs. Once the page has been created and set up on OpenAvenue, you can download it, work on it with your favorite text only editor and then update that file on the handbook repository. It's that simple. A few minutes once in a while should be plenty of time for a compile person.

Write Person

Next we need a few technical writers. It will help a writer to know a little something about the EMC. It will also help a writer to be able to put about three to nine common english words in readable sequence. But we are not asking for finished, book level writing here. If you write e-mail you can do this. A writer might take one of the topic files from OpenAvenue and push it into a narritive, a howto, or a description. Or a writer might have an interest/expertise in some aspect of EMC and produce a topic from scratch -- fresh scratch.

The time that you spend writing will depend largely on you and the quantity of material you take on.

Edit Person

Edit people are desperately needed. If you don't believe me start reading the existing pages. Editors will need a little bit more specialized skills. For example:

• EMC Content reviewers
• Writing Editors
• Style Editors
• Html editors
• PDF and PS editors

These may be the most sporadically time consuming tasks. But they are the tasks that will bring together the handbook and make it a valuable tool for anyone wanting to use the EMC. These are also tasks that can expand or contract as you have the time for them.

Maintain Person

These are the people who take all the flack when the EMC doesn't work the way the handbook says that it should. They are also responsible for seeing that their pages are current. These folk could be any, or some, or none of the above described folk. They will work in their own specialized way as glue between the developers, the pages, and the people who use them.

Philosophy

Nothing that is a part of the handbook is sacred. The name, the cover page, the index, all of the pages and all of the graphics are editable. As we develop it, I expect that we will produce some style guides. But even these will always be negotiable. You should know that the EMC Handbook is a GPLD document. It is, and will continue to be available to all. Your work will not be swallowed up by some commercial outfit without your knowledge or credit. Since parts of the handbook are e-mail, the writer of those for the most part, holds the copyright to those materials.

Okay, so how do I get involved?

Contact me or any of the maintainers and offer to help. Tell us what you are willing to do. You might look at the todo page and see if there is something there that you could get into. Or see if there is something that is not there that ought to be done. It's that simple.

Thanks for your interest and your help.

Ray Henry