Page 2 RAIN Spring 1986 RAIN Volume XII, Number 2 Spring 1986 Coordinating Editor F. Lansing Scott Managing Editor Ralph Coulson Contributing Editors Steve Johnson Stephen Schneider Circulation Manager Alan Locklear Intern Julia May Contributors Rob Baird Jeff Brown Verena Burkolter-Trachsel Donald J. Clark Carlotta Collette Madeline Dalrymple John Ferreli Margie Gardner Dan Hemenway Karin Herrmann Jenny Holmes Mimi Maduro Chuck Matthei Takeshi Murota Kris Nelson Michael Philips Jeff Strang Kirby White Shin Yoshida Graphic Design Consultant Susan Applegate Printing; Argus Printing RAIN magazine publishes information that can help people make their communities and regions more self-reliant, and build a society that is more participatory, just, and ecologically sound. RAIN is published quarterly by the Center for Urban Education. RAIN subscription and editorial offices are at 3116 N. Williams, Portland, OR 97227; 503/249-7218. Subscriptions are $18/year ($12 if you live on less than $7500 a year). See page 39 for additional subscription information. Writers' guidelines are available for a SASE. RAIN is indexed in the Alternative Press Index. Copyright © 1986 Center for Urban Education. No part may be reprinted without written permission. ISSN 0739-621x. Cover illustration by Connie Cohen. RAINDROPS Change, Change, Change Well, it's been almost five months since our last issue. Have you missed us? We hope you'll find this issue was worth waiting for. The reason for the delay is that we made several changes at the beginning of this year. First, we decided to make RAIN a quarterly publication after all. This was a question we had been pondering for some time, and after weighing several considerations, we decided that a quarterly schedule made the most sense. A quarterly schedule will give us more time to develop our national and regional contributor networks, and will also allow us to do more major feature sections like the section on Japan in this issue. Financial constraints also played a part of our decision. Taking self-reliance to heart, RAIN is now operating on a zero- deficit budget for the first time in many years. The production and mailing costs of a quarterly are much less than a bimonthly, even though we offer you the same number of pages per year. Another major change is in our production process. RAIN is now completely computerized! This issue was typeset and laid out on an Apple Macintosh and LaserWriter by RAIN staff. No more farming out of our typesetting and graphic design and paste-up work. Although this meant extra hours and late nights on our part, it was nice to know that we could do it ourselves (and it was also nice to save typesetting and layout costs). Another step for self-reliance! There seems to be a good future in this kind of “desktop publishing," although at this stage of the game there are still many bugs to work out in the technology. Much of the layout process on this issue seemed unnecessarily clumsy and time- consuming. Finally, we've had a change in our staffing configuration. Ralph Coulson's temporary, part-time stint as managing editor has come to an end (although he still graciously volunteered some time during the production crunch of this issue). So now our editorial staff consists of one full-time person—me— while Steve Johnson continues in his role as contributing editor for the Community Information Technology section, and in this issue, the Other Japan section. Additionally, CUE director Stephen Schneider has stepped in to take a greater role. He is picking up some of Raph's duties, and is making use of his expertise in nonprofit management as contributing editor of a new feature— ‘Tools for Organizations.” I also want to introduce our new intern, Julia May. She came to RAIN in the midst of a career change. She had been designing integrated circuits with National Semiconductor in Silicon Valley. Now, at RAIN she spends long hours sitting on the other side of a computer screen from a bunch of integrated circuits. (You know how it is with circuits: “what goes around, comes around.”) She has also been part of the reforestation brigades in Nicaragua, and was editor of Labor Perspectives on Central America. So she brings a wealth of useful and varied background to RAIN, and has been a hard worker, too. For all intents and purposes, she has functioned as co-editor for this issue. With interns like her, who needs staff! I don't want to leave out volunteers from the staff picture, especially since we would like to encourage more of them. Jenny Holmes, a graduate in environmental science from The Evergreen State College, has been helping out around the office (and has written some reviews in this issue). Alan Locklear continues logging income as our volunteer circulation manager. He says he wishes he had more to keep himself busy, so please send him your early renewals, publication orders, and gift subscriptions right away! He would also like to explain how our shift to a quarterly will affect your subscription ... —FLS To All Subscribers Regarding RAIN's new quarterly schedule, we want to assure all subscribers that in translating the remainder of your bimonthly subscription into a quarterly subscription, you'll get at least as many months of RAIN as you paid for, if not more. That is, if your subscription has one more issue (1/6 of a year), you'll get one quarterly RAIN (1/4 of a year); two more bimonthlies (1/3 of a year) translates to two quarterlies (1/2 of a year); three bimonthlies translates evenly to two quarterlies; four bimonthlies translates to three quarterlies, and so on. —AL V
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