Jaffa | # 1 | 2009-11-21, 20:39 | Report

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!

christexaport | # 2 | 2009-11-22, 03:44 | Report

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.

jjx | # 3 | 2009-11-22, 04:00 | Report

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.

christexaport | # 4 | 2009-11-22, 08:47 | Report

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.

christexaport | # 5 | 2009-11-22, 08:49 | Report

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.

lbt | # 6 | 2009-11-22, 09:27 | Report

@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!)

---

Last edited by lbt; 2009-11-22 at 11:35. Reason: and then please delete this then useless post

qwerty12 | # 7 | 2009-11-22, 09:37 | Report

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.

wedda | # 8 | 2009-11-22, 12:13 | Report

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.

wedda | # 9 | 2009-11-22, 12:16 | Report

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

edgedemon | # 10 | 2009-11-22, 12:47 | Report

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>