The "Dear GNOME" Project

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

So,

All credit to Owen for this great idea. We can also blame him if it sucks of
the arse. Thanks Owen! :-)

  This really fits in well with what I'd like to see on the new GNOME
  website, and our outreach activities, so I'm going to see if we can kick
  this off early. Perhaps everyone will need some time to get used to it.

  "Dear GNOME" can provide an easy and personal way for new developers and
  our user community to communicate with the project as a whole. Sometimes
  questions or comments are far too wide reaching to post to a single list
  or Gnotices thread, so a small team of editors can go a long way towards
  bringing the GNOME project to a single person.
  
  Perhaps it will end up being a weekly edited FAQ, perhaps a great place to
  ask developers questions without feeling you're interrupting their hacking
  time, perhaps it's just a good way of recording what we're already
  answering so repetitively on mailing lists every day.

  I'd do this in a similar way to Kernel Traffic (I was once the author of
  the SLUG Cousin, which unfortunately died due to lack of coeditors - it
  was not really a big enough community for it), with deargnome gnome org,
  delivered to a small mailing list of editors who can claim questions or
  comments and answer them. Once a week or fortnight, these can be published
  on the GNOME website and publicised to LWN, LinuxToday, etc.

  Each publication will hopefully draw many questions, comments and
  responses, and if we decide to do away with comments on news.gnome.org, we
  can point to Dear GNOME as another contact point.

Further ideas for this? I'd like to get started on it. :-)

- Jeff

-- 
   "Everyone says they like Free Software - not everyone is ready to make   
         the tough choices to make it happen." - Maciej Stachowiak