Re: 'diversification'

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 6:39 AM, Stuart Jarvis <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 October 2010 14:05:17 Justin Kirby wrote:
> Heh, seems I never remember to reply to anything nowadays until you do :-)
>> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 5:54 PM, Jos Poortvliet
> <[email protected]>wrote:
>> > One is the multitude of communication platforms openSUSE has. KDE is
>> > doing reasonably well: kde.org is the home page, dot is the 'official'
>> > news site,
>> > and planet is for community contributions. But now there is
>> > projects.kde.org,
>> > with it's own news feed.
>
> That freaked me out when I discovered it, but then I realised it's 'just' a
> front end to the git projects (I hope?). Syndicating it into some of our other
> news channels could be good though (www front page?)

kde.org is the home page > editorial/web-master duties clear and assigned

dot KDE official news > moderated, timed according to the Grand
Schedule that Jos will be giving to Stu soon B^), curated, a source of
interesting, substantial, well-written news done in accord with KDE
philosophy and collaboration

plant  > aggregation of community contributions. Selected
contributors, but they edit and moderate themselves. Much looser
relationship with KDE. projects.kde.org fits with planet-contributions
from selected people/projects. Little curation, moderation or editing.

>
> In general, ever time I find another .kde.org subdomain I imaging God killing a
> kitten. discover.kde.org, spread.kde.org - just a couple among many zombies...
>
>> > It's great but maybe think about integrating
>> > things a
>> > bit more somehow? Showing the news on planet or something, I dunno...
>
> Planet has a config option to include Dot articles (Jonathan and myself put
> that in a month or two back). Likewise application team feeds, spanish blogs
> etc

It's appropriate to syndicate Dot into Planet. Syndicating in the
other direction makes the Dot redundant.

>
>> > Second, during my time in Promo I have often been frustrated a bit with
>> > great
>> > posts about conferences or releases being posted on planet - while I
>> > thought
>> > they should've been going to the dot.
>
> Yep

Marketing. This is a question about getting people to understand the
value of Dot and to share information with Dot. It may also involve
doing Dot stories about great Planet posts, even if after the fact.

>
>> > We have the same in openSUSE and
>> > are currently discussing a solution: get rid of news.o.o as an
>> > independent thing
>> > but instead turn it into a chery-picking tool for the planet. The
>> > marketing peeps who used to write there will get a 'marketing blog'
>> > which will be automatically aggregated on news, the rest can be choosen
>> > where and when needed.
>
> I'd be interested in the technicalities of that, but more below where Justin
> mentions that
>
>> > This could also be a possible solution for the dot - it's something to
>> > think
>> > about. It surely has dis-advantages - you can't edit the planet posts,
>> > for example. But as add-on it might just work ;-)
>>
>> Interesting idea...I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other but
>> here are a few things that come to mind in no particular order:
>>
>> - It would probably require less 'editing' work given it's aggregating and
>> we can't edit at all in that scenario.  No html code formatting, begging
>> for pictures, etc would be nice :)
>
> True. However, we could also achieve that by giving everyone on the Planet
> editor privileges on the Dot and getting them to upload their articles
> directly - presumably we don't do that because we see some benefit in the
> editing process. Likewise, we could abandon the two editors have to check
> rule, which again would make things quicker at the expense of perhaps a drop
> in quality - there would be more typos etc.
>
> (I don't favour any of the above)

I don't favor loose editor privileges. On a recent article, I made a
number of changes of "i" to "I". This is an American English error
that is natural for a German speaker to make. But that construction
doesn't belong in the Dot.

>
>> - In general the work load on the Dot editor team would be less I guess if
>> we implemented it, which is consistently low on active volunteers.
>
> It has got worse recently because some previously active people have got
> busier with other things. If we can clone or recruit a few more Carls then
> we'd be ok :-)

Thank you, Stu. It's nice to be appreciated.

However, the workload is not substantial when the articles are
complete. What takes time is resizing pictures, cleaning up links,
researching people's names, in short, the kinds of things that could
be done more easily by the people submitting the articles. That is not
a complaint; it's the start of an idea about how to deal with the
workload. The Dot contact page (
http://kdenews.org/content/contact-dot-editors) could be amended to
include "marketing puffery" (this is what the Dot can do for
you...whiter whites, brighter brights; audience size in the low
billions) and guidelines (example: submitting pictures - please
include 2 versions of screenshots, one approximately 300 px wide, the
other large enough to be readable at 100%. Similar with group
pictures.)

>
>> Anything that makes life easier in that respect is good imo.
>> - I assume this would mean putting in an entirely new content management
>> system in place of the Dot to pull it off.  May or may not be a big
>> deal...it's not like our sysadmins are sitting around bored these days :)
>
> This is the killer for me. Syndication tools exist and could work on a specific
> tag/category being applied by the target authors (for example) but I'm note
> aware of a tool that allows us to easily import posts on an ad-hoc basis,
> could be one out there though. However, syndication tools can result in some
> funky things - the Planet sometimes has interesting formatting issues and
> doesn't handle images with captions that well.
>
> It also would mean that if you read the Planet there would be little point in
> reading the Dot any more.
>
>> - It would result in the Dot never having exclusive/original content.
>
> It could still be possible to add original content - as Jos suggests, existing
> writers could get a special blog for this purpose, that perhaps only appears
> on the news site.
>
>> - It would result in the Dot getting more well written articles from KDE
>> community members who wouldn't normally submit articles to the Dot.
>> - Would it matter to authors/bloggers that we're taking their blog articles
>> and thrusting them into a much larger audience?  Jos, did all the openSUSE
>> folks seem to be ok with this sort of thing?  I just know some people might
>> not want their stuff being put on a 'news site' vs the planet but then
>> again, if they're posting an article on the planet it seems like they'd
>> already expect a wide audience anyways?
>
> Practically - we could make it opt in

Ask. The Dot environment is different from Planet. There will probably
not be articles on the Dot about Ethiopian cooking. But that was a
sweet personal blog post by someone on Planet.

Including op/ed should fit with a Dot editorial policy and be of
interest to the Dot audience.

>
>> - Would it matter that things are often written in a different journalistic
>> style in blogs compared to how articles have been written for a news site
>> like the Dot?
>
> It would be a very different site, imho more like the Reddit KDE page or
> Tuxmachines. news.opensuse.org already looks quite a lot different to the Dot
> from what I can see. More articles are not necessarily a win if the quality
> drops and people stop following the Dot
>
> So, my few units of a monetary system of your choice:
> - I'd be interested to see news.opensuse.org try this - rather them than us,
> to be honest ;-)
> - I'd be interested to see how they deal with the technical issues, whether
> they can find a platform that makes this easy or have to build their own (this
> is a blocker imho until it is proven to be possible)
> - I'd be interested to see how they deal with political issues, self-
> governance in automated syndication (rants on news.opensuse.org?) picking
> articles and keeping decent quality, some style and formatting consistency
> - If it works well for them, we can debate it and steal their software and
> processes if we think it could work for us.
>
> Cheers,
> Stu
>
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