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Joining ISIS is easy and welcomed in any form. While there are no official "levels" of participation, it is anticipated that members will fit into one (or more) of the following categories, and possibly move between them. At the risk of pushing a metaphor to far, the categories can be thought of as these:
Priests: With full commitment of time and effort to the project, these die-hard supporters are the most desired. Priests will be instrumental in dictating the pace, progress and direction of ISIS. Such people will spend lots of time adding entries to the index, debating over the index, and recruiting new members.
Solders: Soldiers for ISIS will make the difference between its success and failure. Soldiers are not as interested in debates over ISIS, but volunteer a regular amount of time each week adding entries to the index. The more of these ISIS has, the better. The key to being a solider is not the amount of time dedicated to ISIS, but that the amount of time you can give is regular and dependable. If ISIS can count on you for just 15 minutes a week, then you are a solider.
Boatmen: Boatmen and -women contribute index entries in a non-regular manner. Maybe you have some free time that month and want to help knock off some pages. While not as ideal as soldiers, ISIS appreciates any help we can get. Like soldiers, boatmen will be assigned pages to index, and expected to finish them in a timely manner.
Masons: ISIS will most likely need some technical work done. For example, some programming might speed the effort by providing data entry tools. Masons will provide such work, and perhaps other technical support.
Scribes: A crucial part of ISIS, scribes can help by checking the indices for errors. A tedious job, it is unlikely that many will volunteer solely for this task, but if everyone does a little of this, ISIS will be vastly improved.
Advisers: We create ISIS to be used, and we can use the opinions of those who will use the index, but have no interest in helping build it. Advisors will be of the most use when starting ISIS, as well as helping resolve questions of the best way to index certain books.
Freemen: Freemen are those who provide unsolicited index entries for some reason. While ISIS will take these, part of the reason ISIS exists is to coordinate efforts of indexing, so that no two people are working on the same thing at the same time. If you'd really like to be a freeman, be our guest, but realize that you could serve ISIS better as a boatman.
To join ISIS, you should fit into at least one of the categories above. You should also be willing to join the ISIS mailing list, as this will be the primary platform for announcements and debate about ISIS. If you want to add entries to the index, you also need to be able and willing to run some version of the Concurrent Version System (CVS) client software. A CVS client is available for most software platforms, and is described more completely in the Tools page.