Due to my wrong operation, Jos has replyed directly to me. So I forward his email to the list. ;-) On Friday 29 October 2010 06:51:52 Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
(2010/10/29 4:43), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On 2010-10-28 Satoru wrote:
From one of the editors point of view, it is not so easy to determinewhether an article is appropriate for our Weekly News or not. In otherwords, whether an article is just a neutral report onwhat's going on orauthors opinion isn't sometimes quite clear. And, the borderline betweenconstructive opinions and offensive criticisms is often vague.
Oh absolutely. That is also why I send this mail - to try and let us figure out those lines a bit more clearly. It will never be completelyclear - but having a goal in mind (like informing community members whatis going on in openSUSE; or marketing openSUSE to users and visitors tothe site) can help in the decision making.
Please note that what I am trying to say is not that you guys made a wrong choice. It simply depends on what you think the Weekly news is for, what the goal is. And as you guys are making it, that is very muchyour decision. If you want to inform the community about what is goingon, then something like Nelson's blog might belong in there. If you wantto be a marketing tool, then it doesn't. As I don't think that choice has been made you have done nothing wrong ;-)
Hey Satoru!
Yet another strategy discussion for Weekly News here. :-D
Just as we have to define who are our customers when we discuss about strategies for marketing, we have to define who are the supposed readers when we edit Weekly News.
Yup!
ATM, our teams objective is: "The openSUSE Weekly News are the newsletter of and for the openSUSE community. The aim of the newsletter is to summarize everything that is happening in and around the openSUSE Community. (...)" http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Weekly_news
Of course this can be revised if needed. But currently, I mainly focus on readers:
- who are already involved in openSUSE project/community (including casual users) - who are interested in trends of openSUSE distribution, Linux and FLOSS
And my selection criteria for articles are as follows:
- whether the information in the article should be widely shared by readers or not - whether the article is interesting and/or useful for readers or not
Those may be a little bit different from what Sascha and other team mates have in their mind in detail, but I believe they are much alike.
If we focus much more on marketing element of Weekly News than ever, many things need to be drastically overhauled. How we can effectively use Weekly News as a marketing tool should be further discussed and I want to hear as many ideas as possible from marketing team guys. But in any case, what I am mostly concerned about is, whether Weekly News are interesting for readers and they can have fun with reading them or not. I will never be interested in creating a mere 'free paper for advertising of little interest to anyone'. ;-)
Of course not! We are a Free Software community, more importantly, one of our tag-lines is "have fun". So it should always be fun to read and interesting for sure. It is all about balance, as you said before. As I come from the KDE's dot editor team I have had the same dilemma's - and I like the personal note and slightly informal and light tone in Free Software communication. So I don't think we should do any drastic things - if anything, a small move towards slightly more positive news would be more than enough. But only if you guys feel like changing anything at all - the current goals clearly state the weekly news is for contributors, thus not a marketing tool. I personally think KDE's dot.kde.org has a nice balance there. It surely aims to inform the contributors about what is going on - at the same time, it does try and be a marketing tool, presenting a positive image. It has arguably been very successful in this as the dot is well known and has a very good reputation, being picked up by many major linux news sites like LWN.
Meanwhile, I am also a translator of Weekly News in addition to being an editor. In translators point of view, (translating) Weekly News has one more important role.
As you know, recently an announcement titled 'Advance discontinuation notice for openSUSE 11.1' was posted to -announce list (and to several other lists). http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2010-10/msg00008.html
I think it is a very important information which *every* openSUSE user should share. But unfortunately, such kind of announcements are usually posted only in English, that is, there are few chance for users who are not good at reading English to know the information if they are not translated by someone.
I think translating Weekly News will be helpful for solving this problem, because Weekly News always include such kind of important announcements.
Agreed!
Like this, Weekly News can have several roles. We can include a role as a marketing tool in roles of Weekly News, but IMHO, limiting the role to marketing (or advertising) is not a good idea (at least, neither interesting nor attractive for me).
Nope, it shouldn't be too extreme in any direction anyway. It is about balance - hugely negative things could be skipped but constructive critisism and realistic analysis of what is going on should be in there. Marketing in FOSS should be honest, in my opinion. I hope we can find each other - and even if you guys want to keep it as-is, that's no problem. I just wanted to get some thinking about this, not change anything per-se. Cheers, Jos
Best,
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org