Excellent and creative post Alex about the resposibilities of an Editor! Just a thought along your lines:
- We do not need a PR Manager to *insualte* the community from the enginners. - We need an Editor to ease communications among those 2 groups. Kostis On Mon 06 Oct 2008 11:11:20 Alex Osborne wrote: > Steve Mosher wrote: > > Question: what functions do you see a community > > manager performing. Write his job spec. > > As I see it there's two main points that Risto and others have usually > brought up on this topic, communication and leadership. > > Communication > > This is the big point that everyone always mentions. You can't have > leadership without first a way to communicate effectively. In my > opinion, the wiki is being covered pretty well now and is becoming a > really good _reference_. So what is missing? > > News! News! News! The engineering updates are excellent once you've > discovered them. The community updates by Steve leading up to the > release of the FreeRunner were also good. The planet, as several people > have mentioned is a mixed bag, now and then there's good blog posts by > various people but there's too much off topic or personal stuff that > shouldn't be there and it's in desperate need of a way to filter by > language. Sadsammy also pointed out in a reply to Risto's "Lost > Openmoko Community" blog post that these guys are doing fantastic job: > > http://onlinedev.blogspot.com/search/label/openmoko > > But they're not even in the planet! (I just filed a bug to > admin-trac). There's also not enough stuff from within Openmoko itself > in the planet, it should be a central place to look for news. > > How is news handled elsewhere? For small specialised projects a mailing > list and the lead developer's blog is fine. But the Openmoko community > is extremely diverse covering lots and lots of different bases and is > rapidly growing in size. It's not just a single software package, heck > it's not even a single distro! So lets look to the big diverse > communities. For general Linux stuff there is the absolutely fantastic > Linux Weekly News [1]. In addition to that, virtually all the large > community-style projects have their own newsletters, either weekly, > bi-weekly or monthly: Debian [2], Gentoo [3], Ubuntu [4], Fedora [5], > Mozilla [6] and so on. GNOME [7] and KDE [8] have a continuous > planet-style news rather than a newsletter, but they are edited by real > humans and serve much the same purpose and have recurring feature articles. > > Lets look at what they have in common: > > * Visibility: If not directly on the front page, then a big fat link at > the start of the navbar "News". Not hidden away in some mailing list > (although usually mirrored or announced on lists). > > * Well edited: Typically they have one *human* editor who puts > everything together in a consistent easy to read way and filters out the > rubbish. > > * Sections: The details vary a bit between the projects but in some > form they usually have the following. Theses don't have to be > particularly long. A paragraph or two on each section would do. > > - Table of contents with highlights of the most important stuff from > the other sections. > > - "Corporate" news: What's happening in the core company (Mozilla), > council (Gentoo) or core developers (Linux kernel). These decisions > have been taken. This is the new policy for X. We're opening a new > t-shirt store. We're looking to hire a community manager and two kernel > hackers. We will be having an IRC or real-life meeting to discuss issue > X at this time and place. John Smith has moved to the Foobar team will > now be working on X. This should help a little to give a voice to the > company, what are its interests and where it is going. > > - Special features: Two or three more in-depth articles on a > particular topic. This could be a review of a new program, discussion > on a debate about a particularly tricky technical problem or a round-up > from a recent conference or event with a few photos. It would be good > to have maybe one or two by the newsletter's editor and then some > good-quality articles by guest authors. If there's a good article on > some random person's blog, ask them whether you can include it. > Offering some incentives (merchandise, gear or even a small sum of money > like LWN) could help encourage people to submit good articles. > > - Development news: Digest of the more interesting commits to the > repositories of core projects. Bug tracker statistics (list of fixed > bugs, how many news ones etc). LWN has the mailing list quote of the > week, which often mixes a few funnies (whatever creative way Linus has > told someone their code stinks this week) with rather interesting > mailing list threads worth reading. > > - Software release notices: Generally submitted from the community, > but edited, or at least with a policy of how they should look to be > accepted. Kept short and to the point. One sentence description of > what the project is (maybe a little longer if its a new project), list > of big changes, link to the project's website or install instructions. > > - Community events/announcements: OpenMoko community get-together > in Sydney. Upcoming mobile computing conference in Denmark. New users > group in Italy looking for members. > > - Tips and tricks: This is not so general, but something I noticed > in Gentoo's newsletter and may be useful at this stage where we don't > have obvious GUI methods for doing everything. We get useful hints on > how to do stuff all the time in the mailing list. Just aggregate some > of the good ones with an attribution. This could also be a could > oppurtunity to add them to the wiki as well for later reference. > > This might be completely different to what you were thinking, but in my > opinion we need more of an editor than a "manager". > > Cheers, > > Alex > > [1] http://lwn.net/ > [2] http://www.debian.org/News/project/ > [3] http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gmn/ > [4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter > [5] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN > [6] http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/ > [7] http://news.gnome.org/ > [8] http://dot.kde.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Openmoko community mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
