Re: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues

[AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk>]

Alec Warner wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:30 PM, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The Gentoo PR Project currently appears to be having difficulties with
>> keeping up, both with the newsletters and announcements, and I believe this
>> is currently reflecting badly on the project as a whole. These issues are
>> apparently holding back some key changes to the Gentoo website to make it
>> easier to navigate and help the project appear more active than is reflected
>> by the current front page.
>>
>> If the project needs more hands, and these aren't appearing, then perhaps
>> more should be done to advertise the positions and exactly what they entail
>> (I would suggest announcements on the forums, with specifics on who to talk
>> to for those interested).
>>
>> The newsletter has been having issues for some time, and this makes me
>> wonder if the amount of effort required is excessive for the value obtained
>> from those efforts. While the GuideXML system Gentoo uses for newsletters,
>> etc is nice, does it require too much time and effort to convert articles to
>> GuideXML and get the newsletters published?
> 
> So you go on to describe issues with thew Newsletter.
> 
> What kind of issues?
> Is there not enough content?
At the moment the newsletter isn't getting published at all. If this is 
because there's not enough content being submitted, then I think more 
needs to be done to encourage submissions and/or actively seek out and 
write articles.

This comes back to the number of editors the newsletter currently has, 
which is influenced by the skills required to work on the newsletter 
(currently CVS, GuideXML and knowledge of the scripts used to generate 
standard content).

> Is GuideXML in fact a barrier for submission (do we get complaints about it?)
If there isn't enough content being submitted to actually produce one, 
then tell the community this. As said above, perhaps mroe needs to be 
done to actively seek out and create content.

> Are there insufficient translators?
I can't see that translators is an issue, because even the English 
version isn't getting published.

> Are the editors not posting content quick enough?
> Are the editors editing properly?
> Are there enough posters in general?
> 
>> Alternative setups for the newsletter could be to either go text-only or
>> web-only.
>>
>> Text-only would involved producing a text-only email, which is then copied
>> and pasted onto the website for archiving. This would obviously require
>> minimal formatting work.
> 
> Ok, but if the problems are with finding material; changing how the
> material is posted will not help.
The idea behind this was to reproduce the amount of work involved in 
taking a plain text submission (which I would guess is the form most 
submissions come in) and getting it published in the newsletter. This 
method removes the need for conversion to GuideXML.

> 
>> My idea for a web-only setup would require more initial work, but I think
>> would make maintenance much easier once set up. The Gentoo Newsletter would
>> become a separate website, not based on GuideXML, but on a standard CMS.
>> Instead of having set release dates (weekly or monthly), articles would just
>> be released as soon as they are produced.
> 
> Why does a new shiny CMS enable this?  Certainly we could provide
> access to news/ to a broader audience?
> You seem to think the target audience cannot author GuideXML though.
> 
>> The regular features like bug stats, GLSAs, developer changes could be
>> easily generated automatically (I suspect almost all of those are mostly
>> done automatically anyway - adapting such scripts for a CMS that can publish
>> from RSS feeds should be relatively trivial) and would appear on the website
>> without any intervention.
> 
> This is covered by index2; so I'll ignore it ;)
You're assuming index2 ever goes live. From what I've seen it's been 
hanging around for at least 6 months in a "ready to go live" state, so 
I'm not holding any hopes of this happening any time soon.   =P
> 
>> As above, articles would be published as and when they are ready. Instead of
>> just 1 editor, this website-based setup would be able to have multiple
>> editors with little collaboration required (just to mark submissions as
>> being worked on when an editor picks them up, which should be easily doable
>> using a ticket-based system (bugzilla) or mailing list).
> 
> Does the current news have only 1 editor?  I am on PR but I tend not
> to commit news or approve things.
Why do you not tend to commit news or approve things?

It may not be just the 1 editor, but I suspect the problem is a general 
lack of active editors. From what I've read, current GMN publishers 
require knowledge of how to run all the scripts to generate the standard 
content and write GuideXML to a pretty good standard. I suspect this is 
all quite time consuming (from the little I've done in GuideXML, I 
certainly find that time consuming).

This suggestion would:
1) Drop the skill requirements for news article publishers to being able 
to operate a CMS

2) Require minimum collaboration between multiple editors, allowing the 
number of editors to be easily increased. Inactivity shouldn't be an 
issue in this system, because no single editor is responsible for 
collecting everything together and publishing.

> 
> I would propose an alternative alias or subject tag that will single
> your post request out from the other trash that gets sent to pr@; that
> way it might actually receive some attention.
> 
>> An advantage, as I see it, of the website-based system is that it could be
>> expanded to include features not currently easily possible with the current
>> newsletter - categorized archiving of articles (not just be publish date)
>> and user comments. While I haven't looked, it's probably possible to even
>> find a CMS which includes email notification of new articles as a feature.
> 
> This is a bad sell; we could certainly expand the current one as well
> (with cool new features!) except we have no staff for that (in either
> system).  Talk about what you will do; not what you plan to do in the
> nefarious future when you have copious amounts of free time ;)
The problem with the current GuideXML system is that anything like this 
would have to be coded from scratch most likely. With a standard, 
popular CMS, you'd basically get many of these features for free simply 
by installing a pre-written plugin or enabling the right option.
> 
>>
>> AllenJB
>>
>> PS. This did start out as a submission for a council meeting agenda item,
>> but I couldn't stop writing.
>>
>> PPS. To preempt the obvious suggestion: I do intend to become a developer, I
>> just don't feel I have the time to commit right now. That'll hopefully
>> change in ~6 months once I've finished uni and have a job.
>>
>>
>