[maemo-community] Maemo Weekly News: a proposal

[From: Aniello Del Sorbo]

* maemo.org username: anidel
* Position wanted: contributor
* One/two sentence bio:
Software Developer in London, UK and Maemo open source developer/enthusiast.

Aniello

2009/11/21 Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org>:
> Hi,
>
> I've been discussing this idea with a few key contributors over the
> past few days to make sure it's realistic and feasible. We've polished
> it and would like to ask for volunteers for a new Maemo Weekly News
> digest.
>
>    Workload: little to some.
>    Benefits: glory.
>
> Read on for more info...
>
> BACKGROUND
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> There are a lot of facets to the Maemo community, whether it's
> Bugzilla, maemo-developers, #maemo, Planet, Talk or Brainstorm. With
> the N900 and Maemo 5, there's been a noticeable increase in traffic in
> all these areas.
>
> There have been suggestions of Maemo magazines before, but they've
> fallen over because:
>  a) The people involved haven't been integrated into the community.
>  b) They've been a lot of work to create.
>  c) They tried to move away from http://maemo.org/news/
>
> Similarly, there are blogs (like Reggie's Maemo Talk) which highlight
> key important things; but some of them also suffer from the same
> problems above.
>
> With the increase in volume, and limits on my own time, I'm finding it
> harder to be aware of all the things going on. In particular, little
> asides and so on on talk which are key to the community, but buried in
> a thread. The old complaint of "too much happening outside of
> talk.maemo.org" is now reversed, IMHO, but the SNR is too low to
> follow "New Posts" religiously *and* develop software at the same
> time.
>
> IDEA
> ~~~~
> A weekly news digest of key useful/informative/interesting/insightful
> news from all Maemo news sources. Similar in style and approach to
> Linux Weekly News:
>
>   http://lwn.net/Articles/360596/
>
> This is, in many ways, a continuation of Ryan's "Community Highlights"
> but doing less work, being more encompassing and more repeatable:
>
>   http://maemo.org/community/council/community_highlights_for_december_2008-part_i-january_2009-part_ii/
>   http://maemo.org/community/council/635a8ae4fd0f11dd90b3938ce0b5aa01aa01/
>
> This is NOT an attempt to aggregate ALL Maemo-related news, but
> provide a selection of highlights during the week; of interest to
> those who are involved in the platform and the community, but without
> the time to follow enough of the conversations in all the places to
> find the ones interesting to them. By acting as a filter, more people
> will be able to be involved in the things which interest them,
> resulting in an increase of higher quality submissions for members of
> the community who might not be heard from as much.
>
> IMPLEMENTATION
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> The key to its success is to produce something which is useful,
> integrated and deterministic; but without being a massive resource
> hog.
>
> Produced weekly, every week, with a series of sections - probably
> similar to those on tmo. Something like:
>
>  * Front page
>  * Applications
>  * Development
>  * Community
>  * Devices
>  * Maemo in the Wild
>  * ...
>
> To gather the news, a series of sub-editors/contributors would have
> access to a Twitter account (@maemoweeklynews, say). The posts to this
> feed would consist of the section, a few keywords and a link to the
> content (thread, post, email message, blog) which triggered it. For
> example, recently this may include:
>
>   Applications - wazd helping qwerty12 on Transmission:
> http://s56.radikal.ru/i152/0911/34/a388e13890a0.png
>   Devices - Release firmware available to download:
> http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/maemo-5-final-release-updated-sdk-and-firmware/
>
> Suggestions on content could be directed at it from people's own
> Twitter accounts. The sub-editors would then be able to pick and
> choose from these if it's something they'd missed.
>
> As each issue is being pulled together, one or more sub-editors would
> then review the posts to that Twitter feed for their sections and
> flesh it out with a longer paragraph/quote. Full-blown stories would
> also be possible, but I imagine that being a rarity (if ever). There
> would then be an overall editor(s) making sure there's no duplication
> and also including things from maemo.org/downloads/ (top 10 apps, and
> new apps this week) and the bug jars (top 10 activity, probably).
>
> The completed digest would then be posted to a site and syndicated to Planet.
>
> Hopefully this shouldn't be too much work; and
> sub-editors/contributors would be able to post to the feed during
> their daily review of their slice of the community.
>
> To collect the sub-editors, I'd suggest a recruitment & screening
> process of the form "what 3 would you have done for last week?" See
> more details below.
>
> GETTING INVOLVED
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> I'm now looking for:
>
>  1) CONTRIBUTORS: long-standing members of the community to volunteer
>     to highlight content they see during their Maemo day. This could
>     be whilst sat on IRC, reading the mailing lists, watching
>     maemo.org/news/, contributing on Brainstorm or reading Talk.
>
>     THE ONLY EXTRA WORK YOU'D HAVE TO DO WAS USE YOUR FAVOURITE TWITTER
>     CLIENT TO POST LINKS YOU THINK SHOULD BE IN THE DIGEST.
>
>     Approx. number of positions: 20-30
>
>  2) SUB-EDITORS: contributors who are also willing to flesh out
>     the links each week by selecting a representative quote. I will
>     be ensuring we have the tools in place to make this as easy as
>     possible.
>
>     Approx. number of positions: 5-10
>
>  3) EDITORS: the people with ultimately responsibility. The sub-editors
>     who make sure the whole thing is consistent.
>
>     Approx. number of positions: 2-4
>
> As I want to start it small (it can always grow once we work out the
> details a bit better and see how it goes), anyone who'd like to be
> involved can reply to this (it'll be on maemo-community, my blog and
> talk.maemo.org) with:
>
>   * maemo.org username
>   * Position wanted (contributor/sub-editor/editor)
>   * Preferred section(s) if sub-editor (feel free to make up a new one)
>   * One/two sentence bio.
>
> This is an opportunity to help collaborate and facilitate spreading
> Maemo news; if you're a long-time contributor to the platform, your
> insights will be invaluable. If you're a relative newcomer, looking
> for a way to contribute, this is your chance!
>
> If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
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>



-- 
anidel