Questions for anyone interested in Agora: 1. Would you be interested in seeing an Agoran newsletter? Not like "Last week in Agora"; I mean something more carefully written and covering a longer span of time.
2. Do you think my "Last Week in Agora" summaries are useful? Any other comments? So far I've acted unilaterally in writing them, just to get something started, but I'm open to doing things differently. 3. Are you interested in contributing to either? Archive of weekly summaries: https://github.com/AgoraNomic/Reporter/tree/master/weekly_summaries More detailed thoughts ---------------------- # Goals I have three goals in mind for the weekly summaries and possible newsletter. 1. Make the game more manageable as the rate at which messages are sent increases. 1a. For new or less-active players: I hope these will help you to keep track of what's going on, or to catch up if you have been away. Evidence copied from my original message from October: * From Bernie, 2019-05-19: "I joined Agora a month ago or so, but I got overwhelmed by not having any idea what was going on despite reading the ruleset. I also didn't have very much time to see what was going on, but now I do. What's something I could do to start with Agora?" * From ATMunn, 2019-06-04: "Sorry for my lack of participation in recent events. Here's why in a nutshell: [drawing of recent events going over eir head, if I'm understanding it right]". * From Baron von Vaderham, 2019-07-24: "I am completely lost.. What is going on here?? :0". 1b. Agora's nature as a broadcast email list seems to put limits on how many active players it can practically sustain. If 100 players were all sending interesting proposals and arguments and so on, it would be impractical for anyone to keep up. I'm not claiming to remove this limitation outright, but I do believe that having a system in place for summarizing information has the potential to increase the manageable rate of participation. Maybe the weekly summaries can be a beginning. 2. Help build a coherent and memorable story out of the events in Agora. There's a lot going on, but hindsight can help us pick out the important events and see how they relate to each other. 3. Have something fresh to post on the website. 3a. Possible advantage: it would give people interested in the game a different kind of thing to read, besides diving into the ruleset, list archives and CFJ archives. 3b. Possible advantage: having a recent newsletter article on the homepage could make the game look more fresh and active. 3c. Possible disadvantage: If we only publish one and then stop, it might make the game look abandoned to someone visting the website. # Writing a newsletter Caveat: I have never written a newsletter (at least, if you don't count the summaries). I think we could make a low-quality but arguably still useful newsletter without too much effort by looking at the weekly summaries, picking out the events that in hindsight turned out to be interesting or important, and expanding on them a bit. We could also include some messages as complete articles in their own right, e.g. twg's recent thesis. If we have time for more, here are some ideas for making it nicer: * Add extra material like opinion pieces or interviews of current or past players. * Put some more effort into relating what's happening now to things that have happened in the past. I try to do this a little bit in my weekly summaries, but I haven't been around that long. * Write at least some of the articles in a way that makes them easy for people unfamiliar with the game to understand. * Try to merge together different strands into larger threads. I try to do this a bit in the weekly summaries, but it probably works better if you have the benefit of a larger time scale to cover. I don't know how much time I'll have to contribute myself, but I may have time to hack together the low-quality version described above. # Timeline for writing a newsletter When I started the weekly summaries, I was thinking at the end of the year I'd propose we make a quarterly newsletter covering the last quarter of 2019. It's probably a bit late for that. Maybe we could aim to cover recent events through the end of January? My summaries start on October 21. # Help with weekly summaries If the weekly summaries are useful, it would be nice to have help with them. E.g. a rotation. Of course we can change the way they're set up. I have been writing them consistently because I wanted to have complete coverage before sending out this message, but I'll probably take a break if there's lack of interest. - Falsifian
