Hello friends,
Check out our progress! This development status update chronicles progress on the Open
Siddur made since our last update, February 15, 2010.
If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list. We also recommend following updates on opensiddur.org with our RSS feed. (Just visit this URL with your favorite RSS reader: http://opensiddur.org/feed/ .)
The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.
Project Overview
Ever wonder what our project looks like as a flowchcart? Aharon updated the old one to be more readable -- do you get it?
Did you want an Open Siddur web application last year and aren't sure how you can help bring it into reality? Check out these ways you can help advance this project -- even if you're not a computer programmer!
Fascinated by technology and wondering how our work fits into the future of book publishing? Check out this link if you were wondering what a print-to-digital-to-print technology project such as our web application can offer the world more generally: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/wikis/xmlProduction/XMLProductionStartWithTheWeb
Project Team Updates
One way of helping to contribute to the project is offering work
opportunities for our volunteers, some of whom are unemployed,
freelance, and pay for their own health insurance. If you have a job
opportunity and need committed workers and creative thinkers, contact us.
We welcome Shmueli Gonzales and Amir Starr Weg to our team of transcribers. Shmuel's work can already be appreciated here.
Ben Varadi may have graduated Tulane's Law School (congrats!) but the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law & Culture continues to provide the Open Siddur Project with excellent copyright research thanks to Justin A. Levy and an application that Ben devised, the Durationator. Ben's also created a rather excellent Book Scanner. Ben's now working for jgrad, a project of the NOLA Jewish federation providing Jewish resources for graduate students and recent college grads.
New Contributions
Application Development (step by step until it's ready)
Communications
We've made an effort to separate technical discussion into its own area for non-tech participants and followers of the Open Siddur Project.
Most recently we separated
the Live Chat conferences we organize on IRC into separate tech and
non-tech sessions. Logs are posted here.
Following his session at Limmud NY in January, Aharon Varady gave a public presentation
on the Open Siddur Project at the Academy of Jewish Religon's Spring
Intensive in Riverdale, NY last March. (Other guest speakers included
Lawrence Hoffman and Jill Hammer).
New Documentation
Our Transcription Rules for transcribing and proofreading text were completely revamped.
Efraim wrote up an introduction to Hacking Open Siddur Code.
Many, many additions, disambiguations, and edits were made to existing pages on the wiki and at opensiddur.org .