Re: [gentoo-dev] July Council Meeting: Requested Agenda Item

[Patrick Lauer]

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 03:28 +0100, Christel Dahlskjaer wrote:
> I would like to ask that the Council discuss the current state and
> future of the GWN at their next meeting.
I don't think you have to escalate that far. We should be able to discuss things without the thermonuclear option ;-)

> 1. Reliability. The GWN claims to be a weekly publication, yet it
> frequently fails to publish without prior warning. There was no edition
> this week, and Patrick Lauer says that it is "unknown" whether there
> will be an edition next week as Ulrich Plate is AWOL.
We have tried to get a backup structure working, Halcy0n for example 
offered to help. Ulrich never responded to these offers. He usually has 
a good reason for not doing the GWN (like no Internet access, broken notebook etc), but I also find this quite unsatisfactory.

> 2. Permissions. Although it could be considered flattering that the GWN
> should choose a developer's blog as inspiration for an article, they
> should ensure that they have the developer / author's permission before
> quoting them (see previous complaints by brix, ciaranm and others).
As far as I'm aware this has been taken care of. But with the GWN quite understaffed it is not easy to get everything done well.
I'd appreciate some more support from others, but sadly my recruiting
experiments usually ended after one contribution (for example summary of
the -user ML).

> I also believe that when posting an article or interview, a copy should
> be sent to the relevant people to ensure that they are ok with what is
> being posted (my dev of the week interview, for example, was rather
> screwed up and misrepresentative).
My fault. 

>  When someone contacts GWN to have
> something corrected, it would be appreciated were the GWN staff to at
> least deign to acknowledge receipt, even if for some reason they choose
> not to honour the corrections or post a retraction (although refusing to
> publish corrections is extremely insulting to those wronged).
The reason for that is that the GWN is mostly sent out by mail. This 
makes corrections a bit more difficult, but I think having a sane policy 
for that would be helpful.

> 3. Misinformation, misquotations and outright fabrications. Sure,
> there's freedom of the press, but that shouldn't be used as an excuse
> for deliberately making up quotes and printing intentional
> misinformation.
I don't know what exactly you are talking about here. But it shouldn't happen.

> 4. Credit. Care should be taken to ensure that crrect credit is given.
Yes. 

> From a PR perspective, Gentoo could benefit greatly by better
> utilisation of the GWN. I believe that as it stands, however, the GWN is
> discouraging people from contributing and damaging Gentoo's credibility.
The problem with the GWN is the lack of reliable useful contributions.
There was a time when the GWN was ~80% written by me, but that took more
time than I could afford in the last weeks.

> Another thing that concerns me is the way the articles are written. It
> is blatanly obvious that the GWN writers are not native English speakers
> as both the grammar and the flow of the articles is far from attractive.
Help is appreciated :-)
The GWN has become a german thing, we have jokingly discussed writing it
in german and letting someone translate it to english.

> Having read through the archives, I notice that there was once a time
> when the GWN was a great publication, and I would like to think that it
> could become great yet again; in its current state, though, it is doing
> more harm than good.
Agreed.

> Lack of content and poorly written or incorrect articles are often
> justified by the GWN team on grounds of overwork and insufficient
> manpower. When I asked why they were not recruiting, I was informed that
> no-one has any interest in contributing.
There's a big difference between one-off articles and continuous
contribution. Also those that I found most willing to contribute had the
biggest language problems - what we need is support from the native
speakers.

>  Upon speaking with others,
> however, I find that this is not the case -- people are interested, but
> fear (and rightly so) that their work will be edited in such a way that
> it is no longer something with which they want to be associated.
>
> Another complaint is that the GWN rejects any writing style which has
> any degree of character or levity. Any attempt at dececnt writing (the
> kind that would make it into publication in English newspapers or
> magazines, for example), is met with the claim that "the GWN is not a
> humorous publication".
Blame the flamefests of the past. Whenever attempts were made to give
the GWN more dynamic it was flamed down (because ze german humor is not
funny! Nein! ;-) )
So the consensus was to keep the silly jokes out of the GWN since always
someone misunderstands or complains. I'd like to have it a bit more
open, funny, enjoyable ... but there's only so much I can do. 

> I would like to see discussion about the way the GWN is
> (mis)representing Gentoo, how we can better actualise its full potential
> and what can be done to address the concerns listed above.
Sounds good. I hope at some point Ulrich responds.

Thanks for bringing this up,

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move