There have been some discussion some time ago how to make Sword more known and some people showed up with some ideas. I don't know what happened with this and thought about how good is information spreading about Sword and its projects itself. As I am subscribed to serveral lists concerning Sword and related projects, something really important seems to be missing for me: a newsletter.
A newsletter is quite different to the discussions on the mailing lists and I think lots of people are interested in informations about Sword but don't describe to mailing lists because of the traffic - imagine a normal user who just uses a frontend for Sword - or unsubscribed after some days because he did not get it and was just interested in some news now and then. Some example: Go to www.crosswire.org and look what to do if you want to keep informed about Sword and related projects. Just a newsletter. Not subscribing to several mailing lists and then coping with line noise to humble over new releases or whatever. There should be a newsletter which summarizes the last time and informs the subscriber about new releases, new modules, known problems, legal issues, how development proceeds and other statuses about the projects. That is at least my opinion. So it should be made clear, if you think there is a need for this. (Or if I get something wrong and there is a wonderful newsletter about Sword hidden somewhere on www.crosswire.org) If you are unsure and cannot imagine what I am talking about, here is the scoop: - Make the newsletter subscribable from the main pages of Sword and related projects (if possible or make a link). - Find someone who does all the work :o) The last can be quite time consuming, so here is a scenario how to avoid someone getting burned out: - Have someone of every project who makes a summary of what happened the last time. - Have some kind of supervisor who collects this information and creates the newsletter. The other scenario would be: - Someone is subscribed to every mailing list and collects the information. - He maybe gets additional information by other people like project leaders. - This person creates the newsletter and send the newsletter to someone responsible of a project to check the newsletter - If no regrets are made, let the newsletter go to public Besides that, is should be decided how frequent the newsletter comes out. In my opinion, bi-weekly would be nice at this time. For a weekly newsletter the information is not enough and for a monthly newsletter the time between two releases is too big. At first you should decide if yes or no, ignoring the work of organisation and if someone exists who does this. It is important at first to see what to do and not how to do. The second step would be to see how to do it. Any opinions? jps
