We - Dirk, Duncan, Zonker, Stephan and myself - had some discussions the last days and I would like to get your input on the following proposal. Thanks, Andreas Problem: Only very few developers working on openSUSE related projects share with others what they are doing and why this is interesting. Blogging is the current way to do this - but many developers understand under blogging more than sharing work stuff. Idea: To lower the barrier for developers to share information (and setting up their own blog at a free hoster), let's create a blog (proposed name see below - for this text "the site") that everybody somehow involved with openSUSE (both external community members and Novell employees - this should be available for all formal "openSUSE members" ) could get an account for sharing technical aspects of the developers work. We should create several categories or tags initially, e.g. YaST, and ask that every blog entry is part of at least one category so that e.g. all YaST blogs can be read together. It should be easy for developers to add tags/categories to their posts. We should also setup for each category some starting page with further information about the category - and pointing to the blog category. I would create a separate instance besides news.opensuse.org since news.o.o is relevant for announcement articles. Real news articles should be send to news.opensuse.org and not to the site, or submitted again on news.o.org referring to the relevant entry of the site. The goals of the site are: - it should be a fully positive and inspiring thing - make clear to not be a latest-gossip-and-whining blog - it is not a "I bought a new digital camera over the weekend" - doesn't have to be fully technical but should center around development, it could be also covering legal aspects (codecs issue, software patents). Exceptions to this will be accepted and if persons blog that much about non-technical stuff, they should move on to their own blog. The site should allow comments from logged in users for the blog posts. Note: For some systems, like wordpress, there are extensions that you can blog in one systems and it shows up at others, so those people that do blog already, could use this to basically syndicate their entry (if appropriately tagged) on the site. How does the site fit into the existing infrastructure? We have: * news.opensuse.org for news and announcements * planetsuse.org as a real aggregator where people related somehow to openSUSE, Novell and SUSE Linux can have their blogs aggregated. The site should get aggregated their as well. * the site: Discussion changes in the openSUSE and Linux universum from a technical perspective * mailing lists, forum: Overlap with the site * en.opensuse.org: A wiki with a more static content than the new site. Outlook: The idea of the site is to be fully development oriented for a project (see labs.trolltech.com). It should be trivial to push out code via a git/svn repository and have reader of the site try it out. Some examples on what influenced us: * http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/ * http://news.opensuse.org * http://www.novell.com/coolblogs All three have several people blogging on different categories as proposed above. labs.trolltech.com is additionally part of a broader development effort. Discussion: How to name the machine? * lizards.opensuse.org - current favorite * developer.opensuse.org * develop.opensuse.org * tech.opensuse.org * labs.opensuse.org - good name but causes confusion with SUSE Labs. Btw. the SUSE Labs developer should use the site as well. * ideas.opensuse.org would have been a good name, but it is already taken. * knowledge.opensuse.org * research.opensuse.org * brainfood.opensuse.org * developernet.opensuse.org * playground.opensuse.org Thanks to Zonker for inspiring me to think about it - and to Dirk, Duncan and Stephan for good discussions. -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126