CentOS Newsletter contributing

1. Contributors

There are many ways to contribute to new newsletter editions:

• As an author of a featured article
• As a (co)maintainer of a section
  • Community threads featured on wiki/forum/mailinglist/planet
  • CentOS in the news / Errata / Events
• As a contributor in the community (if your contribution is in the spotlights)
• As someone who sends us interesting ideas and feedback
• As a translator to your native language
• As a proof-reader of the English/native language

As a contributor, you will have access to the future newsletter content to manage your own contributions and if you helped with providing us unique content, we will feature your wiki mugshot next to your contribution.

2. How to become a contributor

To become a contributor, you first have to register on this wiki, then send a mail to the centos-docs mailinglist stating your intention to help with the newsletter and the actual contributions you want to make. You will then be added to the NewsletterGroup and have access to read and edit content.

3. Newsletter rationale

Keeping up with all of the activity within the CentOS community is fairly difficult, and the project needs a way for interested parties who are not part of the core team to stay informed of what's going on without having to follow every mailing list.

The community is also growing and doing more events, taking on Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and doing quite a bit that is in need of wider promotion. A regular newsletter will allow us to help keep the larger community informed and engaged.

The CentOS newsletter will:

• Focus on new developments and progress within the community.
• Help disseminate important announcements and project decisions that affect the larger community.
• Use success stories as examples of how the community works.
• Find angles to improve the project and processes in the community.
• Give credit to contributors by mentioning positive work within the community.
• Encourage more community contributions by offering wider recognition.

4. Newsletter releases

The aim is to produce one issue of the newsletter each month. The newsletter is published (made public) on a Tuesday. Right in time for being mentioned in an upcoming LWN edition, and after the weekend. All contributed content needs to be finalized at the end of the weekend. Urgent additions can be added during Monday, but this would be the exception rather than the rule.

5. Newsletter content

The newsletter should always have a positive and motivating attitude, even when soft criticism or opinions are being voiced. Contributions need to be inspiring (both technically as well as socially) and where possible help the reader to feel part of the community.

5.1. Sections

We are looking for a few recurring sections for the newsletter:

• Foreword
• General announcements
• Featured article(s)
  • Occasional contributions from different SIGs
  • Interview with a contributor
• Community threads (interesting information to pass on)
  • Wonderful Wiki Whatever (new documentation in the wiki)
  • Support discussions (mailinglist, forums and blogs)
  • Development discussions (what happens on centos-devel)
• CentOS in the Spotlight (who's covering CentOS) -- Google Alerts
• CentOS errata per version (an overview of the recent errata)
• Upcoming Events

5.2. Newsletter spelling/style

(I guess someone native-English can comment on this)

• Please use an English spell-checker in Firefox. (This will flag the most common errors.)
• We would like to have native English-speaking people to proof-read each issue before its publication.
• Objective (distant) reporting is preferred. Much like how it is done on LWN (does this reporting style have a name?).

6. Newsletter team

At the moment we are trying to get things off the ground into a certain direction. The plan is to find someone who is eager to continue the newsletter once it is established and a good team and working processes are in place.

Currently the following people have signed up:

• GeerdDietgerHoffmann (editor, events)

• MarcusMoeller (co-editor)

• PhilSchaffner (forums, wiki, qa-progress)

• KaranbirSingh (centos-devel)

• AlanBartlett (proof-reader)

• you?

But we can definitely use more people for the other sections (Wiki developments, mailing list/forum/blogs, articles in the news) to take ownership.