Community Artists' Home Page | Why be a Community Artist? | What do the Community Artists do? | Community Artists' Code of Conduct | Volunteer to be a Community Artist

Here's a quick introduction to the h2g2 Community Artists scheme. It summarises the advantages of being a Community Artist, what h2g2 gets out of you being a Community Artist, and also covers the Community Artists' mailing list.

Benefits of Being an h2g2 Community Artist

We do hope that you get as much out of volunteering on h2g2 as all our other volunteers. Remember that you should be doing the work because you want to: we do hope you'll enjoy being a Community Artist, but we will never question you if you decide that it isn't really for you. Just let us know if you change your mind, need to take a break, or would prefer to join one of our other volunteer schemes instead.

There are plenty of benefits of being a Community Artist. Here are the main ones:

• You get direct access to the in-house team and other artists, who will gladly provide their expertise for free.

• You get access to the Community Artists' mailing list (see below).

• We'll let you know about new gadgets we're developing for the site and encourage you to have a go and comment. This is a real opportunity to influence what happens on h2g2.

• You get a shiny Community Artist badge on your Personal Space and have the right to add <./>CommunityArtist</.> (which appears as CommunityArtist) after your name when posting.

• You get a considerable amount of kudos within the h2g2 Community.

How You Can Help as an h2g2 Community Artist

For more details, see What do the Community Artists do?

We need the Community Artists to illustrate the Guide. Clubs and societies need logos and badges, and while the h2g2 Photographers can help with some Guide Entries, others can only benefit from an illustration. The site couldn't exist in its current form without the Artists: once upon a time all artwork was done in-house, but there came a day when we realised we realised we'd need help illustrating the ever-expanding Guide.

We also get to discuss our development ideas with our volunteers before they become reality. Often we've changed an idea because, after discussion with the volunteers, we've realised that things would be better if done differently.

The Community Artists' Mailing List

The Community Artists and internal staff currently share work in progress via a private mailing list to which all Community Artists are subscribed. When we subscribe you to the mailing list you receive an email detailing the URL and the various ways of accessing the mailing list.

The mailing list is for invited members only, so you can be perfectly candid there. Indeed, that's the point: it's for discussions about onsite issues that might be too sensitive for a public forum, and for announcements about new versions of the test site and suggested changes to the scheme. At the same time, please keep general Community Artist conversations off the mailing list so as to avoid filling it up with lots of friendly greeting messages - please do that on the Community Artists' Home Page here on h2g2.

That said, any questions you have can be fired at the mailing list, and you'll find the other Community Artists will be happy to help you out. We like to let discussions develop before diving in with any official standpoint, as you are very much involved in the development of the site and the scheme, and discussion aids that.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that being a Community Artist is also a lot of fun.