VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org | June 2003 [Newsletter Index] [Previous Page] [Next Page] [Feature Index] editor@os2voice.org

## The future of the VOICE Newsletter - continued.

An editorial view from Christian Hennecke.

Last month's editorial has created quite a response throughout the community. Two former contributors have rejoined the translation team and several others have offered their help. This has brought some relief, but we could still use more. Remember, the more contributors we have, the less work there is to do for each of us. We have also received an offer for help with the INF version.

Several readers have responded to my musings about shutting down the INF version and introducing CSS to reduce the work load. See also our Letter, Addenda, Errata page. The consensus was that we carry through with what is necessary to keep up the Newsletter. We'll see what actions promise to be most effective and doable.

Meanwhile a mailing list called articles-eCS-OS2 has been independently created at Yahoogroups to allow exchanging and collecting suggestions for future articles. We have updated the "Topics" of our guidelines with what has been posted there so far. So if you are considering writing an article, but don't know what to write about or you aren't sure if others would be interested, have a look, join the mailing list, or contact us directly.

Speaking of which, I was surprised how many people apparently think that they have nothing interesting to say. Actually they would be surprised if they realized that usually they know a lot that others may not. Everybody has some area of special expertise, be it how to handle certain more complicated tasks with their word processor or the easiest way to reach certain objectives by using special tools. If you aren't certain whether a topic would be interesting for others, ask us or use the aforementioned mailing list.

Another source for confusion is how to start. Quite a number of readers approached me who would like to contribute, but are a bit scared of attempting it. Well, all our authors had to start somewhere, many by copying the style from other articles. We have tried to make things a bit easier for you and included sections dealing with both reviews and how-tos in our guidelines. If you are interested in doing a review, we strongly encourage you to read Esther Schindler's article How to write a product review for POSSI's Extended Attributes magazine. Finally, we'll try to help you to get your article into shape. This is not even particularly altruistic on our part. If it turns out you like writing and submit more articles, the investment pays off handsomely for us.

Many people who wrote (or posted about it in Usenet) mistakenly seemed to think the article concerned the VOICE organization itself. It wasn't, though VOICE itself could benefit from more active membership as well. VOICE membership continues to remain steady, but there has been a steep dropoff in the semimonthly member meeting attendance. To try to counter that the meetings have been moved to the first and third Saturdays of the month at 3PM (15:00) Eastern US time (Currently 19:00 GMT). Hopefully this is a more convenient day/time for people on both sides of the Atlantic.

If you can possibly make it, please try. Don't know how to attend? See our editorial from two months ago "Let's Chat!" or the VOICE Meeting Information page.

VOICE is currently in the planning stages for moving its main server from the current one cohosted in Michigan, to a new machine located in New Jersey. The advantages, besides a faster machine with more resources (including a 800MHz AMD Athlon CPU and UW SCSI RAID), are that the site will be cohosted by a VOICE member (Ken Kirchner) and will be on a full T1 access line.

In other VOICE member related news, Roderick Klein has assumed the position of Vice President on the VOICE Board of Directors. That's the good news. Unfortunately this past month, Andrew Welty, has resigned as Board Secretary, so another position has opened up. Andrew will be missed on the Board, but he will continue to contribute to VOICE as the editor of the News section pages. If you would like to serve on the VOICE Board please contact Walter Metcalf at presidentDESPAM@os2voice.org.

Finally please note that beginning in this issue all email addresses have had the term "DESPAM" added to them to help prevent the web scavengers from adding them to the endless SPAM address lists. The amount of mail we receive to addresses, some of which have only appeared once or twice in the Newsletter, is becoming staggering. If you want to send us email, please remove the "DESPAM" term before hitting the send button.

VOICE Newsletter Update: Our Newsletter translation team is still in need of backup. To be able to help you don't have to be a very good translator or HTML programmer. If you have profound knowledge of English or German spelling and grammar, you can also help with editing the articles. Some hints on translation activities are also available in the FAQ. If you can help please contact christian.henneckeDESPAM@os2voice.org

Please note our new Disclaimer page regarding warranty and copyrights, and the respective terms for submitted articles in our Guidelines for submissions to the VOICE Newsletter.

We are always interested in your thoughts and views on subjects related to OS/2, and would like to see opinion/editorial pieces as well as hardware/software reviews and HowTo articles. If you have an idea for an article, why not write one. It's one of the best ways, short of programming native OS/2 applications, that you can help the OS/2 Community. And anyone can do it. If you have a few hours to spare a month, we could really use the help of an additional editor to write editorials and assist in running the Newsletter. Few of our writers are professionals. They are just OS/2 users trying to help other OS/2 users. Please send me your ideas or better yet a draft of an article to editorDESPAM@os2voice.org. Please note our guidelines for submissions to the VOICE Newsletter. There you will find suggestions for topics, hints on content, structure and formatting, as well as the legal stuff.

VOICE Online Update: This month the general member meetings are scheduled on June 7 and 21 at 3PM EDT (19:00 GMT). Please note the change in time! Everyone interested in OS/2 or eComStation is invited to attend either or both of these sessions in #VOICE on the Webbnet IRC network. For more information on attending online VOICE IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

If you have an idea for a Speakup event, please submit it to liaisonDESPAM@os2voice.org, and we will try to schedule something. As always, please be sure to check out the updated VOICE Future events Calendar in this newsletter or on the VOICE website at http://www.os2voice.org/calendar.html for more details on future VOICE events.

This month eComStation 1.1 is now shipping! Mark Dodel and Christian Hennecke got there hands on the downloadable images beforehand and have scrutinized the long-awaited new version closely. If you want to learn about the changes and additions, have a look at eComStation 1.1. Mark and Christian tell you what you need to decide if it's worth upgrading or not.

Next Mark Szkolnicki explains how to get the most out of WarpVision - the Swiss army knife of multimedia players.

The IDE versus SCSI squabble is ages old. During the last years, SCSI has become one of the areas where vendors start to neglect OS/2 driver support. While its getting harder, there still are different products and vendors to choose from. Read about Per Johanssons quest in SCSI on OS/2 - A personal view.

Finding a decent Internet Service Provider can be difficult, especially for broadband connections. Timothy Sipples re-joined the pack. Read about why he did choose to do so and what he experienced before everything was up and running while other things of world-wide importance were going on elsewhere: SBC Yahoo! DSL: It's My Turn Now.

Finally we have the VOICE Newsletter OS/2 Tips page and the Letters, Addenda, Errata page. If you have any OS/2 or eCS tips you've uncovered, please send them to tipsDESPAM@os2voice.org. If you have any comments or suggestions about the newsletter or articles in it, please send them to editorDESPAM@os2voice.org.

That's it for this month. Upcoming articles include a look at the Workplace Shell Toolkit by Christian Langanke; a review of CAD Handler, by Mark Dodel; and the next article in the series on DrDialog, by Thomas Klein.

Mark Dodel, Christian Hennecke and Jason R. Stefanovich
VOICE Newsletter editors

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