Distributed Proofreading has been going through some socio-philosopho-technical rough spots in the last few weeks: techno-philosophical problems coping with hacked-together kludgy legacy codebases and growing featuritis, sociotechnical challenges involving centralized vs. collaborative community management and motivating volunteer participants to help balance the several stages of production, and… well some philosophical issues I’ve brought up in the community forums that haven’t gone over very well. Stuff not quite involving the words “stupid” and “dangerous”, but close.

Overall, a stage of unrest and austerity measures, classic institutional infighting between oligarchy and new blood, revisiting old conversations in an attempt to promote conflicting agendas. And a huge structural catastrophe poised to happen when all the work has backed up in the queues waiting for the more advanced, low-production qualified-volunteers-only “later rounds” of the workflow.

And today we’re in the New York Times.

Insofar as anybody reads the NYT who cares, people will probably poke their heads in to see what’s what. I suspect “unprepared for the coming inundation” would sum up the state of DP. Just what we need is a bunch of smart, intellectual, cosmopolitan, literate readers to come along and undermine our factory-inspired ad hoc tissue of ultraconservative social norms with their——

Hold on…. Maybe it is just what we need. [Cf. “philosophical’, above.}

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