3:31 a.m.
Hi all, going to top-post to help add some context to this.
First, I want to apologize for some of the radio silence on a lot of the
Community Blog discussion. I had wanted to create some guidelines or
provide more advice and guidance for the long-term sustainability for
the Community Blog before I left, but I didn't do this as timely as I
wanted to or should have done. I'm going to try to clarify some points
in this discussion as well as provide some guidelines on publishing on
the CommBlog.
As far as active editors for the Community Blog goes, it's mostly been
me alone since July 2016. I didn't do a good job of involving others
into the Community Blog editing process, mostly because I had
internalized a lot of practices and set an operating procedure that I
followed for all articles published on the CommBlog. However, this
morning I created a page on the CommBlog that details these editing
guidelines in depth and details the process that I have used for the
past year and a half for reviewing articles.
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/editor-guidelines/
I've also added this to the homepage of the CommBlog, underneath the
"Write an article" menu.
I mostly wrote this article to be as detailed and informative as I can
be, to help make the process I follow transparent, but I don't know if
it's the most user-friendly operating procedure to follow. This is
probably something that can be improved, but I don't think I'll have the
cycles to work on improving this until August. But hopefully this makes
it a little easier to start somewhere than from the ground up. If
there's any questions or confusing parts of the page, I can rework it to
make something more clear or re-explain something that is confusing.
I see that some people reaffirmed interest or were willing to help with
editing new posts on the CommBlog, which is awesome to see. :) There's
been a lot of effort to keep content organized and tidy both internally
(for CommBlog administrative purposes) and externally (making it easy
for readers to find content), so anyone who is interested in editing
should review these guidelines and try to follow them when reviewing
articles. One helpful task might be to convert some of this longer page
into a "checklist" that a volunteer or editor can follow when reviewing
an article.
I also want to clarify that even though the editor guidelines page is
long and probably a little tedious, I made it that way to the benefit of
trying to be very clear about my own operating procedure. When we
started the CommBlog, me and Remy had intended that the editing bar
should be much lower than something at the level of the Magazine.
Ideally, a new article shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes to review,
or that was the intention. As was mentioned earlier, the big picture
objective we want to do is to encourage contributors to share news and
community updates on the CommBlog. We don't want to bog down motivated
writers who DO have exciting news about the project to share. With the
Magazine, we have the option to say "no thank you, this isn't the right
topic for the Magazine" or if the author isn't a native English speaker
and the article isn't communicated well, we can take longer on it. But
if there's an article, like a new feature or an event report that covers
something timely, we don't want to be strict and wait so long that it
isn't published until it isn't relevant anymore. I feel like spellcheck
is the most effective proofreading skill needed, and an editor shouldn't
have to feel like they need to be a native English speaker to help with
this.
This is running a little long, so I'm going to cut it off here.
Hopefully this information helps clarify some of the earlier discussion
and also provides a place to start from instead of starting from the
ground up.
Thanks for all of the high interest in this by everyone who has
expressed it (as well as all of the authors who have submitted articles
and waited very patiently for them to be published), and again, I
apologize for being anything but timely with this.
On 05/25/2017 07:58 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
thank you.
regards,
bex
On Wed, May 24, 2017, at 05:58 PM, Ralph Bean wrote:
> On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 08:08:53PM +0200, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> You've currently got editing/publishing rights on the Community Blog.
>> There was a meeting today to work on the editing process and it would be
>> great if you could weigh in on the mailing list discussion.
>>
>> In the meantime, we are trying to figure out who has time to actually do
>> the publishing as articles have been sitting in the queue. Can you
>> reply to this email and the commops mailing list with whether you
>>
>> a) Can check the list of pending articles at least once per week and
>> publish per the process
>> -or-
>> b) don't have time to do it right now and will let us know in the future
>> if you can
>
> b) is my situation. I don't have time to help out on this atm.
>
> FWIW, I didn't even know I had editing/publishing rights on the
> commblog(!). It probably makes sense to remove me.
> Email had 1 attachment:
> + signature.asc
> 1k (application/pgp-signature)
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--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com