[Sw-l] Report from Steve's desk

[Stephen Slevinski]

Hi SignWriting List,

The year 2020 is turning out to be a great year of change for SignWriting.

First off, if you know anything about Wikimedia or Wikipedia, please add 
your support to an individual grant I'm applying for to create the 
two-dimensional font.  The community review is open until March 16th.  
Thanks!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/slevinski/ASL_Wikipedia_2-D_Font_Development_for_SignWriting

For 16 years, I was blessed to be able to work with Valerie Sutton 
through the Center for Sutton Movement Writing non-profit as a paid 
consultant.  Unfortunately, excessive government paperwork and 
fundraising issues became a burden.  We have closed the non-profit 
portion of the organization and the Center for Sutton Movement in now an 
all volunteer organization without a checking account.

I'm still blessed because I still get to continue to collaborate with 
Valerie Sutton into the future. I believe in SignWriting and I think our 
13 websites are worth preserving and maintaining.  To keep them up, I 
have assumed full responsibility for the financial hosting of the 
server.  I'm happy to say that the current server costs are covered by 
the Patreon campaign I started last year.

I plan to keep working with SignWriting on a part-time basis.  I will 
have office hours on Saturday, central standard time.
* 7:30 am Gitter Public Chat
* 9am YouTube Live
* 10:30 am Chat with Val
* 1pm Server and Development

In 3 weeks, chances are good that I may start a full-time job outside of 
SignWriting.  These three weeks are very important because I need to 
rebuild the current SignWriting Server that hosts all of our websites.  
We will have a Simple SignWriting Server that only sends files without 
any server processing.  We will have a Legacy SignWriting Server that 
supports PHP for SignPuddle 2 and SignPuddle 3 and others. Once the two 
new servers are built and configured, I'll shut down the current 
SignWriting Server.  This will make sure the websites are up, stable, 
and running for the next few years.

The year 2020 is a year of transitions, new directions, and letting go.  
The new direction is to embrace JavaScript for both the browser and the 
server with node.  The standards are solid and I have several useful 
packages to share that are fully documented with online training 
available.  Once I have the first three packages fully complete, I will 
start the react component library.  Rather than trying to create a 
mutli-user platform for SignWriting, I'm going to focus on the 
foundation and offer tools to other developers so that they can use and 
create with SignWriting for their own websites and apps.

The YouTube station will be called the SignWriting Stream.  I will show, 
teach, and demo the Sutton SignWriting resources we've put together.  
The first episode is this Saturday.  So far the channel is empty.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXu4AXlG0rXFtk_5SzumDow

Let me know if you have any questions, ideas, or concerns.

Regards,
-Steve
https://patreon.com/signwriting

________________________________________________


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