proposal for the board: planet fedora != fedora people

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 05:10:31PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> 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?

If you mean, in this case was the Planet in violation of the trademark
guidelines, the answer is no.  AIUI (IANAL, etc.) a violation would be
premised on an appearance of some sort of commercial link.  In the
case of the Planet, it's clear that the material on the page is a
collection of community members' contributions.  So it would be hard
to make the case for a genuine TM violation.

> 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."

I like that description and wouldn't mind including it.  If people
agree we should have additional feeds containing broader topical
content, in addition to a more focused Fedora-centric one, I'd want to
add that to the description as well.

> > 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?

Sure.  On the planet.fedoraproject.org page, if you click on "Add your
blog" on the left, you visit the [[Join Fedora Planet]] wiki page
mentioned above.

> > 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 :( 

You and I are in the same boat. :-) In my RSS reader I can't ever seem
to read everything that goes on.  And it's easy to get behind after
just a day or two, especially because I'm also subscribed to other
planets like Ubuntu, openSUSE, GNOME, and so forth.  I tend to skim
titles and then dig in where I see something that looks interesting or
important.

> > 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.

It seems a bit out of place on our Planet, although far from a rampant
problem at this point.  I'm certain we have people in the Fedora
community who are active in many different places, and that's not only
to be expected but is perfectly laudable.  Each distro has appropriate
places to talk about work or information that's specific to that
distro.  I think our immediate goal should be to build more context
around the Planet, giving people more complete and understandable
information about how they can populate it with cool and appropriate
content.


-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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