Hi all, Huzza! Welcome to 2017! This year I would like re-ignite the Gentoo news project. It has been smoldering for some time and I think with a small bit of interaction from YOU (the developers, the council members, and, yes, even YOU foundation members), it would be easily rekindled.
To be clear, I have no absolutely no intention of writing a full newsletter each month. Most people's attention spans are not long enough to even read though a newsletter or make it this far into an email, so I'm not looking to spend a lot of time doing that. I have something much simpler in mind. Presently the GMN project has moved. It is now called simply "News". We have a #gentoo-news channel on Freenode and a n...@gentoo.org mail alias. Here is the YOU part: the only way this project will work is if YOU push news announcements to ME. As you understand, Gentoo is a broad ecosystem with LOTS going on _constantly_. I only use one desktop environment and can't look at #gentoo-commits / gentoo.git log to track the changes of major successes or new additions to the main repo. You can use either the IRC channel or n...@gentoo.org to push news items of interest to me. I will handle weeding them out and getting them to the developers and the community on the social sites. The IRC channel is preferred because I am always connected, and messages are instant; but again, as it should be in Gentoo, _your choice_. Example news items could be: * New release of Gnome (or any other supported DE). * New, interesting packages added to the main repo. * New projects - Tell me about the project goal and what you're working on. I will also watch the gentoo-project list, but LOTS of times it's easy to miss things. * Project changes - Want the community to test something? Want to warn us about something? Want to remind us of something? Want to scold inactive members of your project? You can now do that on social sites so that the world can see! Hope you caught the sarcasm in that last sentence. * Event annoucements - Tell me where you're meeting and what you'll talking about. Give me the highlights of a past the event. Tell me why attendees should go to your event. Share pictures from your event. Gentoo is going to be present as FOSDEM 2017. What about Scale? I'd be happy to push invitations to the social sites. Just tell me what to say. For event invitations should also have an announcement on the front page of the main site, IMO, but we can start with getting them to our social sites. * Anything that is exciting that has happened for Gentoo - This goes for projects that completed a long or short term goal, Gentoo being recognized for something important, or Gentoo is seen somewhere in the news media. Good OR bad external news can be shared. You can even rip something off the forums or Reddit and re-share it in #-news. * Gentoo ported to run on a strange or unusual piece of hardware - Recently I saw Gentoo being ported to the PS4. That was something that should be shared with #-news. Once it gets to me, the news will probably go out one news item at a time, in one or maybe two sentences. This way we can be reporting news as it develops, instead of releasing news in a monthly --oneshot like the old project. As mentioned for event invitations above, larger or more important news items can hopefully be shared on the main www page. Also, the QA project seems to be good at generating all kinds of graphs and charts, so I have no plans to use the old Python scripts for those kinds of things. I do have some other ideas up my sleeve for this project in the future. The one thing to take away from this email: if you have some news item that has some value to the community you should share it in #-news. It would be great to release early and release often in terms of news. This will not happen without YOUR help. Anyone who wants to aid these efforts welcome to join the project. Looking forward to hearing any thoughts from you on things that may need to be flushed out a little. Your docs doctor and news host, Mr. Marchese
