Forum OpenACS Q&A: Announcing: OpenACS Forum Summaries Forum

On another thread I described my difficulty in monitoring the OpenACS community. It can take an hour a day to get through the forum postings, even if you ignore postings not relevant to you. And then there are things happening on IRC, other websites, etc... It makes it difficult to keep abreast of what's going on in the OpenACS world.

So for that reason, I've created an OpenACS Forum Summaries Forum. Volunteers will post once a day from a Forum that they have adopted, and people who want to monitor postings from the community will not have to subscribe to that forum unless they want to actively monitor it. The forum is closed, however, so you can't respond in that forum.

A lot of my inspiration for this was the Debian Weekly News, which is a newsletter that comes out once a week to summarize events in the Debian community.

Here are the forums, and who has volunteered for them:

  • Q&A Forum: Jade Rubick
  • Developmental Forum: Jeroen Van Dongen
  • dotLRN Q&A: Malte Sussdorff
  • OpenACS TIPs: Joel Aufrecht
  • OCT meeting summaries: Joel Aufrecht
  • #openacs IRC (only if something important is said): volunteer needed
  • OpenACS related blogs: volunteer needed
  • Bugtracker status: Jade Rubick
  • Aolserver developments: volunteer needed
Thanks to everyone for volunteering! I'm really looking forward to the relief on my inbox!
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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
You rock. Thx. I (and whoever I find to jump in on doing this in my absence) will take on .LRN Q&A.
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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
One more suggestion on format:

Could you start one thread per week, but name the individual postings on a per day basis ?

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Posted by Jarkko Laine on
Could we get an RSS feed for this (as well as others) forum? How far from completion is the universal rss service package? If far, could we setup a feed using the current rss-support for the meantime?
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Posted by Jarkko Laine on
...oh yes, and thanks for taking this up, Jade. You really rock big time.
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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
Nice work Jade.  I can cover TIPs and OCT meetings.
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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Okay, so following up on this: how successful has it been these last few weeks?

My take on it is that a few of the people who have volunteered to help are probably too busy to volunteer for the forums they volunteered for. Perhaps some trading is in order?

I'm currently doing the developmental forum, which is probably the easiest forum to summarize -- not that many posts per week. I'd be happy to trade for one of the busier forums, like the Q&A forum. I don't use dotLRN, so I probably shouldn't volunteer for that one.

Ideally, I'd like to see each forum summarized at least a couple times a week.

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Okay, I'm booting the current volunteers, who have been big-time slackers!

I'm looking for new volunteers for the Q&A, Developmental, and dotLRN forums. I'll volunteer for one of those, but I need two more volunteers.

This is something that REDUCES the amount of time it takes to monitor OpenACS forums. But it only works if two other people are willing to volunteer.

You must be willing to commit to producing at least one summary a week, preferably two or more.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I will continue to post the occasional summary on .LRN forums unless someone else jumps in and wants the job. Sadly I have and will be offline from time to time for a week or so, so a standin needs to be organized.

As for timing, I think once a week should be fine, as this allows us to summarize threads more completely.

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Several people have volunteered to summarize some of the forums. Thank you to Jeroen for taking on the developmental forum (he said he'll post once a week), and Malte will take on the .LRN forum. I'll volunteer for the Q&A forum.

Joel is still in charge of the OCT and TIP summaries.

Thanks everyone!

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
I wanted to do a followup on this, and see how it was going for other people.

I'm hoping that once the site is upgraded, we'll be able to do something like RSS feeds of the forums, so the Forum summaries won't be as necessary. We can do a blog for announcements or something, for example.

I'm only going to be able to do the Q&A summaries about once a week (I'm cutting back). So if someone else wants to volunteer for this, that would be great.