The Lost Openmoko Community: Official newsletter?

Thomas des Courières thomas.descourieres at gmail.com
Tue Oct 7 15:06:01 CEST 2008


As an example like the ones given above (Gnome, KDE, etc..), I would like to
add symfony.

Their developpement politic is discutible, but their comunication with the
comunity is just awesome :
see http://www.symfony-project.org/ and http://www.symfony-project.org/blog

Thomas


2008/10/7 Kostis Anagnostopoulos <ankostis at gmail.com>

> 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
> > community at lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
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