Re: Can we document how to do GNOME announcements, please?

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for kicking off this discussion. It's something I've meant to do
myself at various points in the past (I think I even started writing up
an analysis at one point...)

A few general remarks (apologies for the brain dump):

news.gnome.org has evolved into something that is often only of interest
to GNOME developers, particularly maintainers. There's some stuff on
there that has general interest (eg. the commit digests) but calls for
tarballs are not general interest news items. :)

The format of the GNOME Journal feels rather anachronistic. I understand
that there might be an editorial advantage to infrequent publishing of
whole editions, but I can't help feel that something with more regular
postings (and a design refresh) would make the site much more popular.

I've been keeping the front page of gnome.org going as best I can. There
are some short articles there about the GNOME Foundation elections,
feature proposals, etc.

I have often found myself having to link to emails on gmane.org when
advertising announcements made by the release team. This looks terrible.
GNOME announcements should be GNOME branded and they shouldn't look like
they are from the 90s.

I did some work to tie our social media platform together a bit.
Identica/Twitter posts now land on our Facebook page. Woo hoo!

The way I tend to make an announcement is:

 1. Write a short post for gnome.org (this is particularly useful if the
original announcement isn't written for a general audience; see [1] for
example).

 2. Dent the story on Identi.ca and include a link to gnome.org. That
message then propagates to Twitter and Facebook.

We really need to get a proper process going for granting posting
permissions to gnome.org. I started putting this together on the wiki
[2] and posted to the web hackers list about it [3], but I never got a
response. That's been blocking me from documenting how to post news
(I've been meaning to chase this up but I've just been too busy
recently).

That's more or less where we stand right now. If we want to do a more
fundamental restructuring of our news platforms (which I think we
should), we should discuss goals and strategy before getting into
specifics. What are the different groups of people we want to provide
news for? What kinds of news do they want (and are there any overlaps)?

Allan

[1] http://www.gnome.org/news/2011/04/3-2-feature-planning-underway/
[2] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GnomeDotOrgAccounts
[3]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-web-list/2011-April/msg00023.html

On Wed, 2011-06-08 at 11:57 +0200, 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?
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 
> -- 
> Dave Neary
> GNOME Foundation member
> dneary gnome org