Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I've been discussing this idea with a few key contributors over the past few days to make sure it's realistic and feasible. We've polished it and would like to ask for volunteers for a new Maemo Weekly News digest.

Workload: little to some.
Benefits: glory.

Read on for more info...

BACKGROUND
There are a lot of facets to the Maemo community, whether it's Bugzilla, maemo-developers, #maemo, Planet, Talk or Brainstorm. With the N900 and Maemo 5, there's been a noticeable increase in traffic in all these areas.

There have been suggestions of Maemo magazines before, but they've fallen over because:

1. The people involved haven't been integrated into the community.
2. They've been a lot of work to create.
3. They tried to move away from maemo.org/news/

Similarly, there are blogs (like Reggie's Maemo Talk) which highlight key important things; but some of them also suffer from the same problems above and none yet go into the level of detail I'd like to see.
With the increase in volume, and limits on my own time, I'm finding it harder to be aware of all the things going on. In particular, little asides and so on on talk which are key to the community, but buried in a thread. The old complaint of "too much happening outside of talk.maemo.org" is now reversed, IMHO, but the SNR is too low to follow "New Posts" religiously and develop software at the same time.

IDEA
A weekly news digest of key useful/informative/interesting/insightful news from all Maemo news sources. Similar in style and approach to Linux Weekly News.

This is, in many ways, a continuation of Ryan's "Community Highlights" but doing less work, being more encompassing and more repeatable.

This is NOT an attempt to aggregate ALL Maemo-related news, but provide a selection of highlights during the week; of interest to those who are involved in the platform and the community, but without the time to follow enough of the conversations in all the places to find the ones interesting to them. By acting as a filter, more people will be able to be involved in the things which interest them, resulting in an increase of higher quality submissions for members of the community who might not be heard from as much.

IMPLEMENTATION
The key to its success is to produce something which is useful, integrated and deterministic; but without being a massive resource hog.
Produced weekly, every week, with a series of sections - probably similar to those on tmo. Something like:

• Front page
• Applications
• Development
• Community
• Devices
• Maemo in the Wild
• ...

To gather the news, a series of sub-editors/contributors would have access to a Twitter account (@maemoweeklynews, say). The posts to this feed would consist of the section, a few keywords and a link to the content (thread, post, email message, blog) which triggered it. For example, recently this may include:

• Applications - wazd helping qwerty12 on Transmission: http://s56.radikal.ru/i152/0911/34/a388e13890a0.png
• Devices - Release firmware available to download: http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/11/1...-and-firmware/

Suggestions on content could be directed at it from people's own Twitter accounts. The sub-editors would then be able to pick and choose from these if it's something they'd missed.

As each issue is being pulled together, one or more sub-editors would then review the posts to that Twitter feed for their sections and flesh it out with a longer paragraph/quote. Full-blown stories would also be possible, but I imagine that being a rarity (if ever). There would then be an overall editor(s) making sure there's no duplication and also including things from maemo.org/downloads/ (top 10 apps, and new apps this week) and the bug jars (top 10 activity, probably).

The completed digest would then be posted to a site and syndicated to Planet.

Hopefully this shouldn't be too much work; and sub-editors/contributors would be able to post to the feed during their daily review of their slice of the community.

To collect the sub-editors, I'd suggest a recruitment & screening process of the form "what 3 would you have done for last week?" See more details below.

GETTING INVOLVED
I'm now looking for:

1. CONTRIBUTORS: long-standing members of the community to volunteer to highlight content they see during their Maemo day. This could be whilst sat on IRC, reading the mailing lists, watching maemo.org/news/, contributing on Brainstorm or reading Talk. The only extra work you'd have to do was use your favourite Twitter client to post links you thought should be in the digest.
   
   Approx. number of positions: 20-30
   
2. SUB-EDITORS: contributors who are also willing to flesh out the links each week by selecting a representative quote. I will be ensuring we have the tools in place to make this as easy as possible.
   
   Approx. number of positions: 5-10
   
3. EDITORS: the people with ultimately responsibility. The sub-editors who make sure the whole thing is consistent.
   
   Approx. number of positions: 2-4

As I want to start it small (it can always grow once we work out the details a bit better and see how it goes), anyone who'd like to be involved can reply to this (it'll be on maemo-community, my blog and talk.maemo.org) with:

• maemo.org username
• Position wanted (contributor/sub-editor/editor)
• Channels you follow
• Preferred section(s) if sub-editor (feel free to make up a new one)
• One/two sentence bio.
• Two or three links you'd've posted in the last 2 weeks.

This is an opportunity to help collaborate and facilitate spreading Maemo news; if you're a long-time contributor to the platform, your insights will be invaluable. If you're a relative newcomer, looking for a way to contribute, this is your chance!

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

As a blogger myself, I see this as encroaching on our territory. Sounds protectionist, but its a natural reaction. I'd prefer if certain stories from the feed be collected and used for the weekly review. Maemo blogging is competitive, despite all the cooperation. We don't need yet another Maemo news site. Why not support the various ones already out there? We spend our money and time getting the news. I personally don't want to see more of my audience moving away, especially since many jumped from Symbian to Android and iPhone blogs. We're trying hard to fill the space, spending cash buying devices, and now it seems Maemo.org is intent on filling our space.

Maemo-Freak works hard to maintain its space, while also not encroaching on the space Maemo.org occupies. Why not help us do our jobs better, and let us continue doing the news, and let Maemo.org do the developer/advanced user thingamabob...

I'm pretty mixed about this, to be honest. I want it in a way, but aren't we already providing it at other sources? I say kill the RSS aggregator, and have a news management team that chooses the best stories for the weekly review, and let Maemo.org (Hard to not say "The .Org."..) forward information to the blog community for us to publish and promote.

I've never thought about this, and probably need to sleep and think about it more first.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I'm amused to see a self-proclaimed blogger concerned about news encroaching on their territory.

After all, blogging is all about creating a million feeds each encroaching on each other's territory, saying more or less the same thing umpteen different ways :-)

I think LWN is great, and blogs are almost universally poor at aggregating and editorialising into a weekly summary the way a good dedicated weekly news publication can do. Of course there are lots of poor ones. LWN is a superb one and a great example to follow, but probably very difficult to follow well. LWN's strength comes from excellent choices of articles and excellent, often knowledgable authors.

I think something more like the regular GNU newsletter would work better. Keep to simple mentions of the salient, interesting developments. In-depth stuff is already available in countless wikis, blogs and so on, so the most useful thing is good editorial which brings together the "best of" and basic information about why you might be interested to take a further look.

The old Kernel Traffic publication and it's sister publications covering Wine and other things were also great examples of this genre. They could be thought of as blogs with a predictable publication cycle, but their style makes the information more accessible than any blog I've seen.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I only feel this way because our purpose is mainly to promote Maemo and the developer community in some way or fashion. It would be hard having to compete for audience with our site subject. I'd rather maybe featuring certain reputable bloggers to write feature spots or something. Otherwise, we'll see the best bloggers leave spaces to fill this new one. Those spaces are communities, and abandoning communities can be fatal for some of the niche communities and blogs out here.

It's already hard to see Maemo.org as the place for smartphone support when that's what you've done for so long. Now they want the news. What is this, Google? What next, you're giving away free navigation, too? LOL!

If we can work together and complement one another, cool, but do we really need another news site? I'd rather less, as long as its not mine or one of my favorites. For some of us, this is a job and part of our livelihoods. So I'm biased, of course.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

And I try my best to stay unique. MF bridges the gap between the geeks and newbs. Some focus on enterprise, others on content creation. We all do different things in the same space. I'd like to see something from the dev's point of view more than news, per se.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

@christexaport ... ROFL

@Jaffa (and tmo moderators) could we *please* have a separate thread to debate this idea (and I'm thinking to move posts like christaexport's valid if somewhat amusing comment (oh, wait, make that plural) and jjx's reply) and keep this one on-topic for those who wish to participate/implement?

Please? (and then please delete this then useless post!)

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Since I'd like to get in before this thread turns into yet another Something vs. Something Else thread, I'd like to apply for a contributor position, please.

maemo.org username: qwerty12
Position wanted: Contributor
Channels I follow: Talk, maemo-developers, #maemo, and Planet
Short bio:
Links I would've posted:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=384320 - Heavily biased, I know, but it is a prime example of the community getting together and implementing something Nokia have left out. The amount of votes on that bug mentioned in that thread shows the demand for the feature requested.

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=385638&postcount=9 - Still some issues, but the app works brilliantly and I was IRCing from my N810 using the N900 as a Bluetooth keyboard, thanks to VDVsx.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Thank I never knew maemo freak was a site I'm going to go and take a look, but if its rubbish. I won't be going back.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Love your iDont video on the home page. I'm going to link to that. Its great...

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

This +1

Seen maemo-freaks on twitter, but didn't know there was a full website behind it, will keep an eye on it and see what you do...

<browsing through now>

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

What is proposed here is a weekly digest of community activity, modelled loosely after LWN. If you have a look at the LWN archives you'll see they're nothing like your blog (or any other Maemo-related one at the moment). If any blogs were providing this data Jaffa wouldn't have to propose this in the first place.

I don't see any conflict, and if "MWN" happens it will probably also be a good source of material for the bloggers.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Since I spend most of my maemo time in bugzilla, I could forward any interesting developments from there.

maemo.org username: lma
Position wanted: contributor
Channels you follow: bugzilla & mailing lists (mainly lurking since 2005), talk/planet/wiki less religiously.
Two or three links you'd've posted in the last 2 weeks:

• Heads up: osso-backup gotchas.
• Discussion about pulseaudio performance, resampling, Palm patches.
• Support sending files via Bluetooth in file manager now has 77 votes, an internal bug and is roadmapped for "5.0+"

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

For those who've volunteered, or potentially interested in sub-editing but not sure what it'd entail, I've outlined a bit about how I think contributors' posts will be managed by sub-editors (and the content/HTML used to render them) here:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/003363.html

Hopefully, the examples I gave will dissuade anyone that I'm trying to take away from the irregular, deep, long articles posted on blogs with the regular, shallow (but broad), short articles part of MWN.

As has been pointed out, by digging out the diamonds in the rough, this'll help bloggers uncover news snippets they'd otherwise been unaware of. And, if their own content gets included in the digest, it'll drive more views to their own sites (and hence revenue streams).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I'll chime in, as I somewhat see Christexaport's point (though I don't know I would word it the same. ;))

It sounds as if this is aiming to be somewhat of a refinement of Planet Maemo, only less automated and more intentional?

What about something like the Carnival of the Mobilists? It's a user-organized weekly column that is hosted on various participating sites each week (as well as a link on a central site, to aid discovery). The idea is that one participant hosts each week, and the others post a mention, as well.

We had an interesting discussion about this at Nokia World 2009, or something similar, as sites such as Nokia Conversations have begun doing their own unboxings, reviews, and such (typically bloggers' 'territory'). Bloggers such as myself and Christexaport find it encroaching, while the companies obviously enjoy greater control.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Sort of. With smaller summaries, people not opting-in and the contributors going out to find content on blogs which may not be on Planet; buried in Talk threads etc.

Indeed; but this isn't content generation: it's content aggregation. There was a suggestion above, and it kind of comes through in your point, that this is a maemo.org or Nokia thing. I'm just some guy, y'know. No affiliations to Nokia, the Community Council (although I wish we'd had this idea when we could've claimed credit for it, although perhaps there was less use for it before) or maemo.org (apart from it being the home of the Maemo community).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Jaffa -

I understand that it would not be affiliated with Nokia or Maemo - no problems there. I don't really have a problem with your idea, either, honestly. I mean, competition is always good for the end consumer, anyways - it would just make bloggers such as Christexaport and myself have to work harder. ;)

I think, though, that it came across a bit like you saying that the various 'maemo bloggers' (using the term to describe anyone who has setup a blog around maemo, regardless of intent/quality/etc) aren't doing a good enough job, and you think you could do it better, or organize people who think they could do it better.

While that's immediately offensive, as I said earlier, the competition should only serve to make bloggers work harder.

(we bloggers are an egotistical bunch, btw. ;))

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I don't think this would "compete" with your (or anyone elses) blog much - Linux Weekly News doesn't compete with blogs about Linux. If you're saying interesting, informative or insightful things then isn't it more likely to drive traffic to your blog by highlighting it?

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I don't think there's any competition involved or offense meant. AIUI MWN would be complementary to blogs, catching the stuff that tends to fall through the cracks.

There's currently very little reporting about what happens within the community, and it's certainly become too much work to follow all the various channels of activity. We'll probably (Jaffa correct me if I'm wrong) want to avoid consumer-oriented news (eg "N900 now shipping") since those are already covered better elsewhere and in a weekly digest would be both redundant and out of date.

Conversely, your audience probably doesn't care much about what happened this week in IRC or bugzilla.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Great initiative Jaffa!!

I just want to express my full support, and if you need something from the Council you know where to ask :).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I also think it's a great initiative. I enjoyed Wine Weekly News _a lot_ while it was alive, and hope to do so with MWN :)

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

You know how to make sure you get enjoyment; get involved ;-)

Anyway, another example of the content I'd contribute (it's easier to spot these things as you go through):

Hopefully these examples will help to dissuade rcadden and christaexport that I'm trying to tread on their toes - indeed, as jonquark says, it should help drive traffic to their sites, rather than the opposite. Yes, it's implicit that I don't think this is an audience the blogs are catering to, but neither do I think they ever intended to! The blogs are doing a great job highlighting consumer-facing news and explaining, in-depth, what that means to the users. That's not the same as fishing through the depths of tmo, IRC, Bugzilla and Brainstorm to highlight where the interesting activity in the community is happening each week.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I'm past alll that, and all for a weekly digest type deal, and you can count on my participation on a part time basis from time to time, if I'm welcome. Just too busy now, and waiting on my N900 is making me crazy. I don't have a single mobile device right now. All are broken or on loan. For those that don't know me, I spend zero time on laptops and desktops unless I'm in the studio. I spend at least 6 hours, usually more, actively using my device as my main computer. I'm actually depressed as hell not having a mobile. Won't even have my N900 for the DFW meetup wednesday. Life sux, unless the DHL truck shows up tomorrow.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Jaffa, all,

We have started to tinker about the possibilities of a specific UI for this task. I believe you would be trying to make a mockup in the near future, and I would be happy to provide my services to help setup the system. However, I will be traveling a lot and spare time will be sparse.

Is there a wiki page used to coordinate our efforts?

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Funny. I think some of the "blogger" issues come from a closed-source (competition-based) world colliding with an open source (free market) world. But, funny also, since I've been blogging since June 2000 now and I've always viewed blogging as an open source, the more the merrier sort of world by design. But, maybe it's just me...?

I'm glad that the issues have been resolved -- it seems -- since Jaffa's original proposal was/is nothing but good for the community and bloggers alike.

Wow... I haven't posted here in weeks and it feels...strange. Ok, carry on.

Tim

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

One of these things is exactly like the other. . . . ;)

I'm guessing you probably want to compare it more to the sort of gatekeeping that more traditional journalistic entities (like newspapers) tend to practice and we've seen exactly how well that arrogance has turned out for them.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Indeed. No time at the moment to set up a mock-up (as I describe in the mailing list post.

Just created http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Weekly_News

I might try and fill it in this evening, but I'm in the process of packing for a mini-trip and so time is running out...

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Thanks to everyone who's volunteered so far; I've now fleshed out the wiki page with more examples, details and next steps (OTTOMH):

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Weekly_News

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Thread stickied.

Thanks for the effort Jaffa.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Hi guys,

Small update.

I've started working on a small PHP framework that will be used to develop the tools for people who would like to contribute to MWKN.

Just to get the discussion going again:

- I am currently working on implementing a lightweight "Browser" of sorts for the contributors, so that they can easily and quickly find the message they want to select and use in the edition. This will collate data such as direct URL of the thread/post, author information, date, etc.

- The system will be robust in the way that it won't allow the same article/post to be discussed a second time without overriding some protection.

- At first it will be quite rough, but as the software matures I'm expecting to implement wysiwyg functionalities, also enabling drag&drop, and having highly interactive webpages, so that the work will be as small as possible. After an edition has been compiled, reviewed and approved, the system will allow to generate in a few formats.
- I am currently hoping to output to PDF, HTML (web page), raw text.
- Other transmission formats include email, twitter, blog post and RSS feed.

- People will be able to mark and submit items freely, so that contributors are pointed to them, in case it has been missed by everyone who contributes regularly. This will obviously be honeypot for spam, but that's just how it has to be. Only URLs will be accepted, and tinyURL and other services will be banned, and even just images will be banned (the system will do a pre-load of the page and ensure the mime-type of the content submitted isn't pure jpeg or binary).

- I've started working on a resource adapter framework which will allow people to write their own resource adapter implementations (yes, this is PHP). What this will enable is that people who are used to the twitter API can help us reach a greater amount of information. I'm currently working on the mailing-list API and talk.maemo.org API. Both will most probably be web based, due to the complexity of interfacing with SMTP/POP and having raw access to the TMO databases.

Comments are highly welcome,

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Excellent, cool stuff. I can give you access to mwkn.net and the box running on it. Source code control in gitorious? Or garage project?

Cool. The biggest problem with getting a useful link out of reading the mailing list or being on IRC is capturing the link. Having a tool which makes that capture easy for contributors is key.

Initial roughness is fine, but as the (sub-)editors' enthusiasm drops off, the tools being trivial to put together an issue, and expand on the captured information is key. This is why I included some example macros for doing common things (such as linking to a user profile and expanding their name).

Not quite so sure about this. It seems we've got a good scattering of contributors and they'll be open during the week to suggestions; and can see the #mwkn hashtag on Twitter to decide whether to Tweet/submit something @mwkn.

I certainly see value on having people like Tim and Aniello being able to slightly adapt their existing Twitter workflow. If they see something they want to be included in the next MWKN, they can include "#mwkn" in their tweet. The mwkn Twitter account can follow approved contributors and re-tweet what they say.

Therefore, the Twitter resource adapter which presents information to (sub-)editors can "list all tweets by mwkn which haven't been included yet".

The key for contribution, IMNSHO, is making sure that the high-calibre contributors don't have to waste any time to put something into the submission queue, to make it available to a (sub-)editor during the collation of an issue on a Sunday evening. If they see something worth sharing (such as Quim's post about fMMS and frals) they can do it with just one or two clicks from within their browser. Whether that's Twitter clients like Echofon, or bookmarklets for opening a "recent posts to maemo-developers" window.

The key for sub-editors is being able to - over the weekend - in a multi-pass way, decide whether a submission should be included, expand on it with contextual information, put it into a preferred order within their section.

The for editors is being able to quickly review the whole issue and decide which of the items in a sub-section get promoted to the front-page.

Agreed.

Sounds like a good start; just shout if you've got any questions.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

Git most probably, however I'd like to get a pretty decent base before we a/ show it to anyone b/ start distributing the code. I know, "release early often", yada yada yada. It's just that I have barely enough time to work on it as we speak, so having to go through people's patches (no offense anyone) really isn't something I have time for. Does two weeks from now sound AOK?

Agreed.

Fair enough, but I was more thinking of a "In case you missed this" contribution. The tool should be able to spot if the link is part of a thread on tmo that has already been submitted, or mailing list of a twitter post that was already published two weeks ago. By applying an "importance" ratio, it would come up in a specific rank of the "things for editors to check out". Just a thought, might be an idea when we start running properly.

Agreed, but this should be as much of a priority for "high-calibre contributors" as it is for normal contributors. If we're going to make it easy and quick, let's give everyone access to that benefit.

This really is a focus for me, I want to have editors and contributors not feel like this is a burden. Anything that can be automated or processed should. Everything that causes repetition is bad, will cause mistakes, and will either anger people or make them lose their motivation.

One last thing: Karma. Do we want to include support for it? For example, threads that are selected in MWKN get an extra karma point? I know, weird question coming from me, as I am very much opposed to karma as a whole, but the community likes it, so if there is a use-case for it, we might as well support it.

Edit: PS: I'm still living in a hotel, need to find a flat, a car, get my driving license converted to an Oz one, get a bank account, get credit history transferred, get credit cards, bla bla bla bla bla. So, confer my first point up above in this thread, saying that I don't have a lot of time, I'm really not pushing it.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: a proposal
 

I'll hold you to that ;-)

[qutoe]Agreed, but this should be as much of a priority for "high-calibre contributors" as it is for normal contributors. If we're going to make it easy and quick, let's give everyone access to that benefit.[/quote]

Absolutely. I did mean that all official contributors were high-calibre :-)

+1,000,000,000.2

Having an API with which we could write a karma aggregator seems useful; but perhaps something for phase 2?

Sounds like fun :-)