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

[Christel Dahlskjaer]

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 10:56 +0200, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> 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 ;-)

I have no idea, I asked people, they suggested the Council. It may be
the wrong place :)

> > 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.

I am sure his reasons are good, and I agree there should be a backup
structure in place. 

> > 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).

Which is why I am hoping that by bringing it up elsewhere, someone may
have some ideas of how to recruit people, or just attract people enough
for them to make the occasional contribution. 

> > 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.

Ok, thank you.

> >  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.

See, if you spent less time arguing with that elitist bastard Chri...
er, no :P Yes, I think what the GWN needs the most is more hands at the
deck. 

> > 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.

I don't think thats a bad bad idea, that is, maybe someone could atleast
vamp it up a bit before it goes live. 

> > 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.

Nod. I presume for some contributing weekly is rather difficult (finding
something to write about, finding the time to draft, re-draft, clean,
tidy, send off for feedback, double check, stand on their head etc etc)
however I guess it would be possible to rotate if there was enough
'freelance editors' on the uh, payroll.

> >  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.

So, what brought on the "This is not a humorous publication" attitude
was infact outsiders rather than the GWN team, as in, it was reactional
rather than a case of you guys just deciding fun was bad? 

> > 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.

I hope so too, I also hope that anyone who may have some ideas will
speak up rather than everyone just telling me how horrible I am for
bringing these issues up! :)

> Thanks for bringing this up,

Thank you for pointing some of them out.