RCL 20 book contents -- first draft

Last update: 24th July 2002

Revision history

2002/07/24,15:30

added section on submission formats

Introduction

Welcome.

This site contains information for the contributors, and other related visitors, working on the RCL 20 book project.

The intent of the project is to create a book that marks twenty years of the U.K. handheld users' club, HPCC. As far as possible, we want the book to be written by club members and those, who in one way or another, have helped shape the development of the club.

Editors

The project has developed from conversations between the two editors, Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz and Frank Wales. Both are founder members of the club, and both have written or contributed to the club over the years. In addition, both have a lot of experience with writing for both the audience that the club addresses, and other audiences.

You can e-mail Wlodek or Frank with your comments about the project.

Timescale

For reasons too sordid to explain without the availability of legal counsel, we're on a bit of an abbreviated schedule. Having said that, most of the actual effort is in the hands of your esteemed editors, so we're kind of in autohoisting mode, petard-wise.

Anyway, this is the timetable we're working to at present:

23 July

Send out invitations to participate

26 July

After they stop laughing, participants accept the challenge

10 August

Participants submit outlines or initial drafts

26 August

Final date for contributions

6 September

Editing completed

7 September

Large amount of swearing at various copy-preparation products

8 September

Copy delivered to printers

14 September

Sample book checked and corrected

20 September

Books delivered from printers

21 September

20th anniversary conference, London

Initial contents lists with suggested contributors

In order to have some kind of plan to start with, we hashed out a list of potential contributors, and a list of topics, and put them together as follows. This will undoubtedly change as we get responses and information from those that we contact.

Our initial hope, which we don't think will actually work out (but we're still looking into it) was to get permission to reprint the Beep short story that Gordon Dickson wrote for HP Journal twenty years ago. That would provide some context for how handheld computing devices were seen when the club was formed, and would give us a point of reference now that we're about halfway to the year when the story was set. Even if we don't get permission, we will still write something that sets the context, and shows where we are now, and where we might be going. As such, there's still mention of this in the draft contents list below. This will undoubtedly change over the next few weeks.

In the table that follows, the word count relates to the page count by assuming that there will be about 250 words per page, on average. The priority column is how important we think it is for the item to make it into the final work, with 1 meaning must have, and higher numbers indicating progressively lower priority (obviously). The contributors column shows our current thinking on who could write each section -- this will undoubtedly change.

Help needed, part one

We're taking suggestions for the project motto. At present, it's "this will undoubtedly change".

Other features

We want the book to be both good-looking, and be something that a reader can dip into, as well as something that has sufficient structure that it can be read straight through. As such, there are a few things we'd like to incorporate on an opportunistic basis throughout the book, bearing in mind the time to do it, and how disruptive such things might be on the design of the book:

• Celebrity calculator users
• Interesting and useful things members have created
• Interesting and useful things with calcs in general
• Cartoons
• Jokes
• Quotes
• HPCC biographies

Our expectation is that we'll trawl through what's been published in Datafile and other sources during late July and early August, to amass a bunch of things like this that we can dip into, and that we'll then decide exactly what to use where as we put the book together. Again, contributions of little snippets like these are welcome.

Potential contributors

This is a list of people we figured might make good candidates to approach for contributions. Other suggestions are welcome, bearing in mind the insane timescale we find ourselves up against.

Help needed, part two

We don't have current e-mail addresses for a few of these people. If you happen to have one for those with yes in the E-mail address needed column, please let us know what it is, so we can attempt to rope them in too. Thanks.

Submission formats

We'll be assembling the final work as one or more PDF files for processing by our printers. We therefore need material in a form that we can readily convert. Try to submit in one of the following formats:

• Microsoft Word (up to Office 2000)
• LaTeX
• HTML
• plain text

We'll consider other formats too, within reason. We do have access to machines running Windows, Linux, Unix and MacOS. If you have special requirements or want to submit in another format, get in touch.

Book design

We intend to convert all submitted documents to a consistent typographical style, which we'll be designing during August. We'll be using professional standards of presentation throughout, so the result will have all the design characteristics of a properly-prepared and edited book. We'll put up samples of the design here as they become available.