Can we document how to do GNOME announcements, please?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

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?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org