Stamp Smarter Foundation

,Don, with all the kind words of others. How can I help remotely? Russ

Hi Russ,
I will contact you this afternoon via email.
Don

Don, while I am tech savvy, I am not tech trained. But I would love to hear from you about what kinds of contributions you are looking for.

Don, what an excellent legacy you have arranged to leave in place. My best wishes go out to you on the next step of this challenging journey.

Hi Don,

I am sorry to hear you are not well. You matter to me more than StampSmarter so I hope you get to stick around for a while yet. Thanks for your service to the philatelic community.

Post #12330 { <<<Edited to add}:






His, Don's, 51studebaker's, final post.

ParcelPostGuy and all,

This hapenstance is a sad honor I will always treasure. It was a thankful comment and is personal. My offer still stands to help the SSF birth and grow as best possible.

Beautiful late winter early spring sunrise this morning here in Indiana. We all need to think about what comes after we depart this life. Don has honered his philatelic stewardship.

Russ

I suddenly realized I had posted the following information about the Stamp Smarter Foundation on the two threads that were started with the notice of Don Denman's recent death.

Don intended for this thread to be his communication port to his friends and supporters in the philatelic community to keep them aware of our progress with the foundation.

Again, I apologize for a duplicate (triplicate?) post but I believe this information belongs here as well.

The original post...






I will briefly respond to this.

We are not quite ready to deal with the mechanics of accepting tax-exempt donations to the Stamp Smarter Foundation at this time, although all the legal issues have been resolved.

Donations can always be made via the PayPal donation button on the home page of the Stamp Smarter website, just scroll down to the middle of the page. Because Don's wife is the only one with access to that account ,and she is not in the position to acknowledge receipts at the present time, your receipt acknowledging your donation will be delayed. Please include a note with the PayPal donation indicating that you would like a receipt and tell us where to send it.

Once we get past the current situation, and have an opportunity to put all our procedures in place, we will make a more detailed announcement about the Stamp Smarter Foundation here on the Stamp Community Family forum, either in a new thread, or in the earlier thread Don started several weeks ago when he announced the Foundation. Please give us time to deal with the shock.

Please continue to post your remembrances and experiences with Don and Stamp Smarter here in the present thread. I am sure that Dawn will obtain comfort in reading how Don affected and influenced the philatelic community with Stamp Smarter and his role as Moderator here at SCF.

Mike Ludeman

I will miss emailing Don about the pages that I work on on Stamp Smarter. He was always willing to help me adjust the pages to the data that I wanted to input and always willing to add any charts that I created to the website. I still have access to most of the databases and charts that I have been working on for 7+ years. It all started when I posted a couple of guide dot charts on this forum. He convinced me to add more charts and images to a database that he created for me on Stamp Smarter website. At the time, my interest in stamp collecting was waning but the work he provided for me had inspired me to continue in a different direction. I have sent many emails to Don over the recent years that he always responded to quickly. He always made any adjustments that I asked and added any charts that I made. I have spent thousands of hours each year into my project and I am happy to hear that my work will be preserved for future stamp collectors. I will continue adding to my databases and charts as long as I have access.

Rest in peace, my friend Don.

PS: It is too bad that the 1851-61 1c plating program that Lorry and I am working on will never end up on Stamp Smarter.

Only if you two stop the project. Via the Foundation, Stamp Smarter lives on.

Parcelpostguy, the program we are working on has never been integrated to Stamp Smarter. It would have needed to be converted from Excel program to the programming language and given a place there. It is not like we are working on it there. It is currently a standalone project.

I hope that someone with at least very rudimentary programming knowledge will be able to help with stampsmarter down the road. I would volunteer, but I just don't have the kind of time it would take.

jaxom100 wrote...



While this response is directed to Jaxom100's post above, it applies to everyone who was working with Don on private and community projects on the Stamp Smarter website..

The Stamp Smarter Foundation was established to continue Don's work. The suddenness of Don's death puts us at a disadvantage in that we had not had time to collect all of Don's "institutional knowledge" about the website and its many community projects.

Our immediate goal it to maintain the website in it's current form for the remainder of this year, but without any significant changes, while we try and get up to speed and understand all Don was doing. Don's skill as a programmer and web designer was unparalleled, and I doubt we can find his equivalent any time soon, but we will try. Anyone with substantial web experience is invited to contact me.

In the meantime, we ask that those of you who have community projects or on-going projects of some nature on Stamp Smarter, especially those where you had accounts and permission to access them to do two things for us:

• Continue to work as you always have, and keep your projects growing


• Contact me, through a PM to let me know who you are, contact information, and anything simple that you can tell me about the work you were doing with Don

For those who want to participate with existing community projects, but do not have a contributor account, please let us know who you are. We hope to be able to add new accounts shortly.

Other people who were contacts for individual projects or features on Stamp Smarter, even if there are no changes or updates necessary at this time, should contact me and let me know who you are and what you were doing.

I don't have access to Don's computer at the moment, but we are looking at his files to better understand how he dealt with projects.

While it won't be soon, we hope that we can eventually reach the point were we have the resources and technical skills to make needed changes to existing projects and perhaps start some new ones.

I will continue to make periodic posts here in this thread, and respond to posted questions. Our world is in a state of flux and getting organized will take time, but we want to continue Stamp Smarter as a tribute to Don, so please work with us.

Thank you all for your participation.

Mike

I can help with programming.

PostmasterGS:

Thank you for the offer.
Contacting you offline by PM.

Mike