Volunteer Positions Available
SWG would not be possible without the help of our members who contribute their time and talents to SWG. If you want to help out with SWG, then we'd love to have you! Simply drop us a line at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org and let us know of your interest. Below are areas and jobs for which we are specifically recruiting volunteers. If you are interested in any of these specific responsibilities, please let us know. If nothing catches your eye but you'd still like to help out, there's always work to be done! We appreciate the help of all of our volunteers, past, present, and future.
TOS Translators
Because SWG is home to members from many different countries, we feel it would be useful and in keeping with the spirit of our community to have the group's Terms of Service (TOS) available in multiple languages. While we don't currently have the resources to translate the whole site, we understand that newcomers to our group might be more comfortable seeing what we're about in their native language. We are seeking multilingual volunteers to translate the TOS into languages other than English. Currently, we have volunteers who have offered to translate into the following languages:
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- German
- Dutch
- Quenya and Sindarin
Volunteers who can offer their help with translating to additional languages would be greatly appreciated!
LiveJournal FAQ Development
Currently, SWG has a fairly extensive FAQ section for both the story archive and the Yahoo! discussion list. However, we have little to offer in the way of helping newcomers to our LiveJournal community, and this is perhaps the most complex branch of SWG. Currently, we seek volunteers to assist the moderators in developing a useful FAQ section for our LiveJournal community. Volunteers should be familiar with how LiveJournal works, particularly communities. Volunteers should know how to take screencaps of websites and should have the means to crop and resize images. It is also helpful--but not necessary--if volunteers have a basic knowledge of HTML. Volunteers will aid in developing questions for the FAQ, writing useful and clear answers, providing illustrations where necessary, and (possibly) assisting with page layouts.
Yellow Pages Coordinator
The Silmarillion Yellow Pages is one of the first projects undertaken by SWG. Unfortunately, not much has been done with it, as our mods focus their time and energy elsewhere. Our goal is to create an up-to-date directory of groups relating to Tolkien and writing that would be of use to our members. At SWG, we recognize that we are only a part of a large online Tolkien community, and we hope that the Yellow Pages will help SWG members and guests find the resources that we can't provide.
In order to assure that information is up-to-date and new entries are being consistently added, ideally, a single volunteer should handle much of the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages coordinator will seek out new groups to list in the Yellow Pages and communicate with the group owner/moderators about the accuracy of the listing. S/he will assure that the links are working and that the information is up-to-date. S/he will manage banner exchanges with any groups that wish to participate in this.
A basic knowledge of HTML is helpful for this job but not necessary or required. This is largely a self-paced position without set deadlines, ideal for a volunteer who wishes to help but can't commit to consistent weekly participation. The Yellow Pages Coordinator should expect to spend a few hours each month checking links and information and sending new entries to SWG's moderators.
Reference Readers
We always need volunteers to read and check essays and research articles that might be included in our Reference section. For more information, please see our Reference Reader job description.
Interested? Please email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org for more information or to volunteer!