On Wednesday 08 June 2011 11:57:13 Dave Neary wrote:
Hi all, I've been trying to figure out what the best place for GNOME project related news & announcements is recently, and it's *really* hard. This is in the context of announcing deadlines for attendee rates for Desktop Summit accommodation. We've also had the call for papers, announcement of the schedule, we have keynote interviews, etc. The DS has been generating quite a bit of news, and yet, you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at desktopsummit.org or gnome.org. We have: * No news posted to www.gnome.org Aggregators: * planet.gnome.org - aggregating personal blogs, definitely not a news site * news.gnome.org - aggregates announcement mailing lists, project blogs & the foundation blog - also not a news site Foundation: * blogs.gnome.org/foundation - infrequently updated, more about foundation news than project news * foundation.gnome.org/press - press releases (not really news) Irregular: * gnomejournal.org - monthly, higher editorial standards, no way to publish something on a day or two's notice Not on gnome.org/not web pages: * gnome-announce mailing list (aggregated to news.gnome.org) * gnome Twitter feed * Facebook group Basically, someone not familiar with GNOME comes along & can't find out our news & announcements, someone inside GNOME wants to make people withing & around the community aware of something, they have their personal blog aggregated on Planet as basically the only way to do that. By way of comparison, The Dot, KDE's news site, rations out the news over the week so that there's something almost every day, and they have some more worked articles every week. They have posted the following Desktop Summit articles so far: 20 May: Desktop Summit team unveils exciting program of talks 19 April: Desktop Summit T-shirt Design Competition 28 February: Desktop Summit CFP and Registration open 6 October: Desktop Summit 2011 to be held from 6 to 12 August in Berlin On the Desktop Summit site, we have just "Desktop Summit schedule announced" and a second article not aggregated on the front page for the t-shirt competition. We are getting left behind at this point, for lack of a good forum. So - after all that doom & gloom, here's what I'd like us to do: 1. Either: - Make http://news.gnome.org a Wordpress blog and document who can add news items to it - Turn gnomejournal.org into something more like lwn, with regular small updates, and more irregular, polished articles : and use the one we choose as the GNOME news & announcements site 2. Document who is maintaining the news.gnome.org planet aggregator (is it the same team as Planet GNOME?) - what we could do is move this aggregator to news.gnome.org/announce or something like that, since it really isn't a news feed, it's an announcements feed. 3. Find out who can post to the foundation blog and potentially use that as a way to publish news items when appropriate. 4. Add a News link to the front page of gnome.org which will point to whatever we figure out in 1. How does this sound as a plan of action? First, the easy stuff, anyone know who's maintaining news.gnome.org, and who can point to the foundation blog? For the harder stuff, what would be involved in creating a "news" blog on blogs.gnome.org, and redirecting news.gnome.org to point to it? Do we have a gnome.org wordpress theme we can use for it?
A possibility is to create a news.gnome.org which publishes a selection of planet.gnome blogs which are meant as announcements. I suggest this because my experience in both KDE and openSUSE's news teams show often contributors post news-worthy articles on their blog. It's quite a challenge to let all good content end up on the actual meant-as-news-outlet (dot or news.opensuse.org). The aggregation would solve this. And you can have the best of both worlds - create a wordpress for a newsteam which publishes on planet and goes to news.gnome.org automatically and additionally allow the news team to publish selected blog posts there with one click. Of course this idea takes more infrastructureal work than having a wordpress as news.gnome.org so that'll be the limiting factor I suppose. But you'll have much better chances of semi-regular, reasonably-quality news even in the face of limited contributions from a to-be-build news team which is a big advantage. BTW I hereby offer my help with editing and occasional writing (in case of a wordpress blog) & selecting (in case of the aggregation proposal). I'd hope my experience could also be useful when it comes to setting up a few policies for the news team.
Cheers, Dave.
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