Planet material

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Dimitris Glezos <dimitris at glezos.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 10:35:35 +0200,
>>  Dimitris Glezos <dimitris at glezos.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm also a supporter for planets that aren't only technical but have a
>>> more personal atmosphere. We could write down some advices (if you
>>> blog too much about non-Fedora bits, consider narrowing your planet
>>> feed, same if you're a non-english speaker, etc).
>>
>> This seems odd. I would think more non-English posts would be a good thing.
>> Especially if people have a way to filter blog entries based on language.
>
> Right on both points. Would be great if there was a way to select your
> languages and only see those posts every time you visit planet.fpo.

Right, the confusion of languages all in the same feed doesn't really
accomplish much besides showing that we have contributors from all
over the place.  However, I don't think it does that as effectively as
say a map.  (For example, http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide)

On the other hand, we compromise much by having a feed that very few
if any people can read in its entirety.  It is, at least partially,
wasting everyone's time.  It also doesn't do as much as it could to
help us learn what each other is doing - or to facilitate cross
community communication.   Nor does it help people outside the project
get a good view of what is going on here.  It is one of the top
reasons I've heard people give for why they don't read it.

I think we'd be a little put off if mailing lists, wikis, bugs, or IRC
conversations were conducted in many languages at the same time.  For
these we've adopted a lingua franca.  I propose we do the same for the
"default" Fedora Planet feed.

Certainly there are people in our community who don't speak English,
blog in multiple languages, etc.  We should be able to provide a place
for that too - maybe separate language feeds linked right off the main
planet page.

Hopefully this isn't a novel or controversial idea.  Many other
technical community blog feeds are doing exactly this already.  In
GNOME, we have many contributors from all over the world all taking
part in and sharing a single conversation.  This is a pretty powerful
concept that reaches beyond the feed itself.

While it is true that my native language is English, many of the more
vocal supporters of using a lingua franca are in fact not native
English speakers.  They generally acknowledge it is important to all
take part in the same conversation if we are to share or goals, ideas,
and ideals.

I think it is important to think about what role we expect the Fedora
Planet to serve.  What is the point of it?  If we think that any part
of the answer involves communication, being part of a conversation
(whether internally or externally), or telling a story then I think we
are better off if we can agree on common terms.

Maybe slightly too abstract but worth mentioning...  I think the
themes on which we want to base Fedora marketing (and the Planet does
play a huge role in this at least to enthusiast communities) include:
cohesive, focused, considerate.  And work our way away from disjoint,
diffuse, contentious.  Productive people tend to like being part of
the former.


Thanks,
Jon

PS.
Other things that I think would help a lot include: topic specific
feeds (eg. virtualization - see Microsoft's tech blogs for great
examples of this in action), links to blogger biographical information
saying what they work on and how active they are in that work (maybe a
kind of meritocracy index - though this seems really hard to do).