Hi All, tl;dr: Following discussion with PMC members, I'd like to kick off this thread on the user list to discuss the future of community contributions on the Mesos blog.
First, I'd like to suggest that the project establishes a blog planet, and encourages the community to add their feeds to create a real-time and unfiltered snapshot of what's happening. In parallel, let's establish a review process for posting to the community blog that can be shared by both release managers and community members who would like to promote their content on the official project blog. *BLOG PLANET* A blog planet for Mesos (MESOS-649<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-649>) would be an unfiltered feed of blog posts about Mesos, coming from blogs of folks in the Mesos community. If you're not familiar with planets, here's an example of one for Apache committers: http://planet.apache.org/committers/. There are already a handful of people and companies blogging about the project, and a planet will provide a single view of all that activity. It also allows establishes a place where folks in the community can share what they're up to, without having that explicit endorsement or review by the Apache project itself. This will allow us to scale the number of blog posts in the future with no bottleneck on the reviewers side, and enable bloggers to publish freely. If others are interested in helping with this, I'd love to have a discussion about the best way to integrate a planet into the existing website. My goal would be to make sure it has a prominent place, while also making it clear where posts originate. *BLOG REVIEW PROCESS* But wait, why do we need a planet when we have a Mesos blog already? Great question! In order to publish content on the Mesos website/official blog, we need a review process of some kind to do some basic quality control and more-importantly ensure that there is neutrality in the post itself. In addition to preparing content for something that is committer-approved by the time it lands on the site, it also lets us do other things like coordinate the timing of publication with related tweeting/press, or with cutting a release. I think it would be worth creating a separate thread on the subject of neutrality in terms of what is contributed to the website and official blog, where we could explicitly define a list of things we're looking at/for to streamline this type of review. There are a number of things to avoid posting to the official Apache blog, like encouraging community members to have conversations in closed channels, directly linking to non-Apache packages without proper disclaimers, etc. We'll enumerate these for our own blog review, but the point being it's important for committers to be aware of these rules before publishing on behalf of Apache. OK, so enough of the rules -- onto the process for a blog post author. Ben Hindman suggested that we streamline the review process and do so in a transparent manner, roughly recommending the following steps: (1) Interested parties post a draft of their current blog post to our dev@list (with appropriate markdown formatting) (2) That post is reviewed by committers and the community (3) Following a conclusion of discussion/revisions, and an appropriate #shipit, an Apache committer publishes that post directly on the mesos.apache.org/blog/ Instead of review board, I would suggest using a publicly-commentable Google Doc to leave in-line comments for posts while they are in revision. *BACKGROUND / MOTIVATION* I believe it's important that we increase contributions to the website blog, which is ideally the source of truth to learn about what's happening in the community and project ecosystem. Our project website is the front door to our project, and an opportunity to capture and showcase the exciting activity in the project and its ecosystem. Since launching the blog on the website in October, we adopted an informal practice of having the release manager be in charge of writing new blog posts for each release. And recently, we cross-posted a revised community update to the blog from Mesosphere. I hope there will be many more posts, both from release manager and community members. To achieve this, I believe we need to establish a process for reviewing blog posts in the future, particularly as we scale contributions beyond the previous responsibilities of the release manager. My hope is that by establishing a process, we can make the Mesos website and blog a place where the community is welcomed to contribute, where we are fair and consistent with regard to what should and can be posted, and transparent about how it gets there. To be frank, this isn't something that many Apache projects are great at, but successfully doing so continue to make Mesos a healthy and vibrant community. Dave
