Thanks for seeding this discussion Dave. The points you make sound great to me.
+1 for the outlined process. > > On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 2:33 PM, Dave Lester <daveles...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> 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 >> > >
