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A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. - Jonathan Swift

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Can you help Friends and Partners?

We outline below some ideas:

But first, the simplest way to help is to join the Friends and Partners email listserver and help field inquiries from the messages posted there. This is how most people contribute and we are very grateful for the many generous folks who help in this way. Click here to join.

As you can probably imagine, there is an enormous amount of work in maintaining an Internet service like Friends and Partners. The following are some ways in which you can contribute to this part of F&P.

• Translation services. We are trying our best to maintain F&P in both Russian and English languages. If you have experience/skills in this area and are willing to volunteer a bit of your time, we would be most grateful for help in translating from English to Russian and from Russian to English. Please contact us and we can set up a means for providing the materials to be translated.
• One of the best ways to help F&P is to set up your own Internet service devoted to sharing information about US-Russian/NIS exchange. Please see the sites by Andrey Sebrant and Skip Evans for examples of what they've done to share information with people around the world about life in their communities of Moscow and Atlanta, Georgia. Nothing would make us happier than to set up an account for you on our server with which you can tell your story of life in your community (or whatever story you wish to tell). We are especially interested now in finding people who are willing to tell our friends in Russia about life in America.
• As the real purpose of Friends and Partners is to get people talking. We are always happy to establish email listservers for groups and organizations working to foster US Russian cooperation exchange. These listservers can be "peered" on our sites in Russia and the US.
• F&P is generated almost entirely now from a database. One of the simplest ways in which people can help with Friends and Partners is simply to contribute records to this database. A record might describe a resource on the Internet that would be of interest to the F&P communities.

  We would especially like to find people who might be willing to "take over" an entire section of F&P and maintain that portion of the database. For example, someone who is interested in Russian history might like to do a better job than we are able to do at organizing material about resources on the Internet dealing with Russian history. If you are interested in this, we can set up an account for you on our database and help you get started contributing and maintaining records.

• We would like to find people that would be willing to host and moderate special "chat sessions" and hosting/guiding those sessions.

• We are also establishing some forums on various topics. These are similar to chat rooms but are not as interactive, i.e., people post questions and comments and come back later to continue the "threads" of discussion. We need people to moderate such forms and to try to introduce interesting topics for discussion.
• Graphic Design. Mike Pilla, a talented and successful designer in New York City is helping us with a gradual redesign of the Friends and Partners web site. Indeed, Michael has already contributed the logo for F&P, some ideas about reorganization and other graphic/design elements. We are looking for others who would be willing to contribute their artistic skills, provide new sets of pictures to be displayed on the F&P pages, etc.

If you can help in these (or any other) areas, please send email to:

[email protected] or [email protected]