On Thu, 19 Jan 2017 16:35:39 -0500
"William L. Thomson Jr." <wlt-ml@o-sinc.com> wrote:

> I think the concept is still sound. Linode used to offer a $100 for 
> documentation. That was so well received, they had to stop the program due to 
> the backlog. I would not suggest it for documentation etc. But a newsletter, 
> why not.

I think it would be nice if there was an alternative way to earn newsletter access
via contribution. Because it does seem strange to me to have to pay for a newsletter
that describes what you're doing yourself in part.

But implementing proof-of-work schemes here is hard and prone to gamification
downsides, so I just concede its probably not easy, and leave this question open
to somebody else who thinks they know of a useful way.

> If people are spending hours putting together a weekly or monthly news letter 
> simply to inform others. Why not pay them a little  for their time? It will 
> hopefully ensure people are always there to do that. Could help out students 
> and others.

It may be worth considering getting volume licensing, ie: advertise to
companies to either buy a block of subscriptions themselves which they can grant
access to X number of people.

Or alternatively, instead of relying on a user-pays model in entity, have a
corporate sponsorship scheme where we give out the newsletter for free, but a company
foots a bill in exchange for some thanks/promotional/unobtrusive advertising.

This would of course have strict requirements as which sorts of companies could
do this, like they'd have to be using Gentoo in some capacity.

And that sponsorship model is well used by quite a few OpenSource things, because it
looks good for the company to be visibly supporting OpenSource.

But like, somebody will probably say they hate this idea because its relying on non-free
platforms in some capacity for money or something. *shrug*

> 
> The Developer Spotlight was good to help introduce people in the project to 
> each other. You may never work with someone but when they are in the spotlight 
> you gain a bit of insight you may never have had otherwise. Helps everyone get 
> to know each other. Not just the technical things going on in the project.

Side note: I hear LWN are looking for writers https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn 

So there's opportunity here for whoever does our newsletter may find themselves able
to help them out as well, and possibly save some effort in writing for both.

Or that could be deemed as a conflict of interest, idk.

But I know LWN quote stuff said here all the time, so one of their editors is
already a fan in some regards.

Maybe we can convince them to come to the dark side? :P

Or maybe we can cut some sort of article federation deal, where we show LWN our
first drafts of the newsletters, and they get first-pick on any articles, and federate
them behind their paywall, and then we release those articles with our own newsletter
after the subscription period has passed:

https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn # Copyrights and further reproduction

> Authors retain the copyrights for their work.
>
> We ask that you grant LWN exclusive rights to publish your work during the LWN
> subscription period - currently up to two weeks after publication.
>
> Thereafter, we retain the right to publish the material, and release it under the
> Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
>
> After the subscription period, authors may republish their work however they wish. 


IDK. I'm just throwing out ideas and hoping something sticks long enough to be useful :)