So, I’m probably a bit late suggesting this - and it may just be the result of almost complete exhaustion (Ceiri, our new puppy, appears to have no intention of letting us sleep any time this year) - but I have all my best ideas when I’m too tired to think straight…
I think it’s time for a new round of project sharing.
Volunteers have been absolutely central to everything that has happened with SSi so far.
Iestyn, Cat, Catrin and myself got the ball rolling on a volunteer basis (and I’m the only one of that group who is on a salary even now) - then we had enormously important contributions to growing the forum, and creating its unusually friendly tone, from our first set of forum Angels - Dee, SJ, Rob, Diane, Gary, Spenny, Al, Elin, Stefani, Sionned, Chris.
Spenny wrote us a custom piece of software which made the speaking and listening exercises possible - which made our original membership offering possible - Sionned took on the challenging role of maintaining the SSiW map - which has been a hugely valuable part of the community building.
Then we had a load of people get stuck in to make the SSiW Eisteddfod come to life - Dee (again), Terry, Dafydd, Jan, Sionned (again), SJ (again), Lisa, Ifanalban - and then all the wonderful people who’ve made local groups happen - who are by now genuinely too numerous to mention (I could run off a fair few, but I’d be bound to forget others!).
We’ve also had fantastic coding input from Stu, Tyger, Ifan, James, Jeff and Kev - James and Jeff have built our Android and iOS apps for Welsh, and are closing in on launching our Spanish apps.
Jon has done superb design work for us - for posters and books and covers and now the new site design itself (which we’ll be rolling out to everyone in the near future).
And then we’ve had our brave testers trying to recreate the SSi method in other languages - Louis with Dutch, MAGA with Cornish, Miles with Latin, Rebecca with Italian, Gaby (and Marissa and Pilar and Rosa) with Spanish, Adrian with Manx, Xose with Asturian, Stella with Russian…
Justin and Eirwen hugely kindly offered us use of their home in San Giacomo to run our Monte Carlo intensive immersion fortnight…
And our hugely important Importing Team - to help get the sound files into the Spennyware - wonderfully organised by Huw, with huge amounts of checking and importing work having been done by Brigitte, Dee, Gavin, Jeff, Joanie, Louis, Marie, Patricia and Stu - which has transformed our ability to get new material put together.
And, of course, all the members of the Growth Club - who by contributing £10, £20 or £50 a month have made it possible for us to invest a fraction of what Jeff’s time is really worth as our sound engineer.
As you can see, it’s a huge, huge list of involvement - and we wouldn’t be where we are now without it. [And I’m very sorry for the people I’ve inevitably forgotten - please let me blame the sleep deprivation!]
So - where are we now?
We’re one session away from finishing L2 northern - and we’re hoping to catch up with the southern in the fairly near future. We’ll then be starting to publish L3 Welsh within a couple of months, I hope. Next stop - the 4k vocab acquisition listening project.
We’ll also be rolling out L3 Spanish - and in the fairly near future, we’ll be publishing a bunch of Manx, Asturian and Russian sessions. The SSiBorg is shaping up excellently - and I’m hoping we’ll start work on another dozen or so languages once we’ve got our first set of feedback on the Manx lessons. And we’ll be able to start doing more specialised courses - a Welsh course for parents, for example, is very high on our ‘to do’ list.
I’m still knocking my head against the wall with advertising our Spanish course - but closer to getting it work, I think, than ever before.
I think I’ve managed to make myself a little braindead with juggling getting new material out and trying to figure out advertising - and I think I’ve been missing the fact that we could set up some new teams now that could drive the next stage for SSi - at what could turn out to be a very exciting time for us (which means I hope that we’re going to be creating new jobs this year).
Teams we’re looking for:
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an Advisory Group (people with experience of building businesses, who can see what we need to be focusing on, or highlight opportunities that we haven’t noticed)
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an Advertising Group (people either with experience, or willing to work with me to get the hang of the ins and outs of Facebook advertising and our landing page/funnel building tool - thinking of ideas, and implementing them)
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a Video Group (people either with experience, or willing to work with me to get the hang of the new video producing tool we’re using at the moment - of which you’ll be seeing quite a bit more in the next few months - we’re not looking for people to shoot videos (although that would be great!) but to help put together content for the tool)
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a Social Media Group (experience generating/sharing valuable content here would be terrific, but anyone willing to brainstorm and implement spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc)
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a Lesson Content Group (to begin with, this would be to help me generate the sentences we need for L3, using the SSiBorg - but before too long we’re also hoping to get writers involved building the dialogues for the 4k listening vocab acquisition thing - again, working within boundaries which will be set by the tool)
In terms of time commitment, I think it would be best if you were in a position to put an hour in every week - maybe an hour a month for the Advisory Group - generally, when it’s less frequent than that, projects start to lose momentum.
If any of those sound like something you’d be interested in helping with, sing out in here or send me a private message - and if not, but if you know someone who might be interested, do please point them at this thread… 
And now I’ve managed to get all those thoughts down in black and white, I’m really quite excited to see who’s going to end up getting involved, and whom I’m going to be working with over the coming months (and years, insha’allah!)…
I’m also intrigued by the idea of writing dialogues. I quite like putting pen to paper (you may have picked that up) and if I can extend my own vocabulary in the process, that would be great.