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

[Christel Dahlskjaer]

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 10:07 +0200, Lars Weiler wrote:
> Congratulations.  I just unsubscribed from the
> gwn-feedback-alias after reading your mail.
>
> * Christel Dahlskjaer <christel@g.o> [06/06/10 04:28 +0100]:
> > 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.
>
> Several times Kurt or I took over the job of publicing the
> GWN when Ulrich asked us.  So, there is a backup, but he
> didn't asked for this week.

I am glad to hear that backup has been used in the past, and I hope that
it will be again.

> > 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).
> >
> > 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). 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).
>
> And I expect the same from you.  You should ask the affected
> people first before starting a discussion about them on our
> public mailing lists.  This is a device I can give you for
> further userrelations-activities.

I have actually contacted Ulrich on several occasions, he chose not to
get back to me. And I have spoken a fair bit with Patrick, and from
speaking with Patrick it is quite obvious that the GWN could do with
some help, and I am hoping that my addressing the problems we can pool
together and find ways of helping them.

> > 4. Credit. Care should be taken to ensure that crrect credit is given.
>
> It is.  Either as "Author" or "Contributor".

Or it is totally lacking, like in the above mentioned blog scenario. 

> > 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.
> > 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.
>
> It's quite interesting to see, that the GWN and also
> Debian's Weekly Newsletter is run by Germans mostly.  Is
> there a problem with native speakers to run a periodically
> newsletter for a long time (> 3 years)?

No, there isn't a problem with it. However, as I understand it the GWN
is translated into N languages, and I would presume the german version
to be the one which reads better. Could it be an idea to have someone
whos first language is English look over and improve upon the English
version? I know we already dot the i's and cross the t's, maybe it would
be of benefit if someone worked a bit on how it flows.

> > 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. 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.
>
> Subscribe to the gwn-feedback-alias and read or comment the
> submissions to the GWN.  Make sure that every user will
> receive and answer.  And forward questions to the
> arch-teams.  Isn't that userrel's job?  I didn't saw your
> contributions there yet.

I wasn't aware the gwn-feedback alias was public, if it is then I would
be more than happy to subscribe to it and read and comment to every
user. Would I be stepping on anyones toes by doing so? And if the GWN
would like to off-load some stuff onto Userrel, then userrel would be
more than happy to help. We already have a GWN representative and he
knows that several of the userrel team would jump at the chance to help
out with various GWN related bits.