proposal for the board: planet fedora != fedora people

[Máirín Duffy]

On Sat, 2010-06-19 at 14:39 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Immediately after that particular case, we added this to our Planet
> page:
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Planet#Appropriate_Material
> 
> We put this page up to make it easier for sysadmins to remove
> inappropriate material quickly.  Since then I don't believe we've had
> a recurrence of inappropriate material (as set out on that page).  Are
> there additional categories that should be covered there?

On a funny-sad note, technically, in those guidelines wouldn't the logo
of another distro and the Fedora logo itself violate the copyright
clause?

That being said, those guidelines are good; they don't address the issue
I had with the particular post I (still, stubbornly) take issue with,
but it definitely would have been helpful to know #fedora-websites was
the place to go - I would have messaged folks there rather than starting
this thread of doom.

I do think some guideline saying - hey, this is planet Fedora, you can
post about non-Fedora stuff but it you don't post about Fedora or
consistently promote other distros you should really rethink listing
yourself here? [1]

If there was some kind of mission statement as to what Planet Fedora's
purpose was:

"Planet Fedora is a aggregation of blogs from world wide Fedora
contributors at http://planet.fedoraproject.org"

This doesn't really help me understand what's appropriate and what's
not, or the real purpose. Something more like this gets more at the
purpose I think?:

"Planet Fedora is a distributed communication tool that many Fedora
contributors rely on to keep a pulse on Fedora's community. Contributors
connect their blogs to Planet Fedora to express to the Fedora community
their thoughts and personality and share what they are working on
through blog posts."

> Today I added a more prominent link to the [[Join Fedora Planet]] page
> to provide more information on guidelines before a community member
> sets up an RSS feed for the planet.

As a Planet reader though how would I find these pages? Neither are
linked to anywhere from there as far as I can tell... would it be okay
to add links?

> I have nothing against multiple planet feeds with different degrees of
> specificity.  I think the one that represents the Fedora Project by
> default should really be the most Fedora-centric, in terms of content.
> But I also think it should help readers expand their view of the
> community as well.

We could do this in other ways though. For example, link to the person's
wiki profile when you click on their hackergotchi. Have a little map (if
they provided their geolocation in FAS) of where in the world they are
from next to their hackergotchi. There are a lot of ways to do this that
don't require non-Fedora posts.

I'll be frank in saying I have way more to read than I ever possibly
could. I feel very strongly that I need to read and participate in
Fedora planet in order to effectively get my job done, so just ignoring
it and shutting it out is not even an option. I guess it's time to start
using a filter somehow :( 

> Earlier I remember Mike McGrath had talked about some of the issues we
> had in "growth without scaling" as it pertained to FAS groups.
> Because we have a very self-service group joining system, we have lots
> of new FAS account holders joining groups with no context around them,
> or any idea what they mean, or whether they even need to be in them.
> As a result, there are "join queues" which have a very low signal to
> noise ratio, and it's hard to figure out as a sponsor on which to take
> action.  We certainly want new contributors to be able to join (and be
> approved for) groups easily, but the suggestion was made by someone
> that invitation groups by default make more sense.
> 
> Does this idea work at all for the Planet?  In other words, what if
> there were a firehose feed that anyone can join (like getting a FAS
> account and agreeing to the CLA/FPCA), and then be promoted to the
> official Planet by simply having on-topic content?  And could that
> decision be made in a way that is equitable, scalable, community
> owned, and which encourages great material on the Planet, without
> being too cliquish?

I think this is an excellent idea.

~m

[1] There are plenty of FLOSS blog aggregators out there that aggregate
the various distro planets together. We don't really need to do it on
our own. Yes, we're a free software project, yes other free software
distros are free software, but I know where planet.otherdistro is.
Talking about some joint work with another distro seems cool, or working
with other people from that distro seems cool - actively promoting that
distro to me feels very wrong.