In another thread on the Q&A forum [1] I very nearly derailed the discussion in my response to Talli about ways to make the community seem more open. [2] One of my suggestions was to have a periodical newsletter. Lars took me up on my word, and after considering it a bit I've decided to give the idea a try.
Unless someone else wants to have a go at it, or it is generally felt to be a bad idea, I would like to hear opinions on starting a tradition of a bi-weekly OpenACS Newsletter in the shape of a post on the Q&A forum.
The way I envision it will work, is that I will bug a pile of the regular people by Email near the end of a week, the first time will be around Thursday evening CET this week. Here people will be asked to submit any news and happenings in their world, news with relevance to OpenACS in the broadest sense.
Relevant news could be decisions by the OCT, release schedules, bug stomping effort progress, themed IRC chat schedules, individual OpenACS tasks completed or begun, progress reports, links to relevant web articles of interest to the OpenACS community, new gigs, organisatorial news, comings, leavings, holidays and celebrations.
In short all the gossip people want to tell the rest of us about, in order for us to get a better feel of what people occupy themselves with. Activities that may perhaps not always be obvious, unless one looks very closely, or happen to be at the right place (the IRC channel) at the right time.
I will wait at least 24 hours for responses, and then try to compose a nicely formatted newsletter and post it over the weekend on the Q&A forum. Depending on what people write, I might quote them verbatim as individual sections. I'll take news in very abbreviated form and fill in the gaps to the best of my abilities if so desired.
The thread below the newsletter could be filled in by news, questions and follow ups from people, who might perhaps not have had time to respond in time, or others, who might not be on my list.
Persons, who in particular might (not) want to be on my mailing list, can post below or mail me directly. Note that people on the list are of course not required to supply news, or even to respond. That is purely up to each person as they see fit from bi-week to bi-weekly edition.
The theme for the first edition will be:
"All the OpenACS News you always wanted to know about (but were too afraid to ask for); from the Copenhagen summit in April to early September 2003."! [3]
*GULP*
Better start writing now, folks. :)
Note: Jade Rubick suggested a blog for the developers as an alternative to a dedicated newsletter. After giving this some thought I'm not sure that would be used much, because in reality people already have access to a similar functionality in the shape of the forums. Also I'd like to see more subjects touched in the newsletter than just the latest from CVS and the core team of coders. Ie. stuff of a general and possibly more personal nature.
Thoughts? Cheers? Flames?
Frank.
[1] https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=116292
[2] It *is* open, of course, it just maybe doesn't always feel that way.
[3] With due apologies to some of the people behind the Moog synthesizer.
