While Auxolotl is making its way through this initial bootstrapping phase, things can get a bit hectic and hard to follow. I propose that we should start creating a weekly news post, detailing the project’s overall progress and direction, the current focus of each SIG, information on meeting dates and other coordination efforts, etc.
Each SIG/relevant party(The Lix team, for instance) adds to their particular section of the article throughout the week before it is published, which includes anything they’d like to share, be it changelogs, meeting information, calls for contributions, or anything else crucial or interesting that might otherwise get buried in the forums.
This could be very beneficial to us in a myriad of different ways. It helps to keep members better informed about the project, creates a central resource for everyone to see how it is progressing, attracts potential contributors by making it easy to see where their skills can be useful, and likely will serve to drive more engagement in general throughout the SIGs. Additionally, this would be a good place to start the official social media accounts off with, via posting the articles and answering any questions or comments.
I’m interested to know what everybody thinks about this–Do you think this would benefit your SIG? What would you want to add to it? What software should be used to best facilitate this? Would this also be a good medium for the core team to post broader announcements regarding project governance and such?
My only concern right now, is whether this draws up too much resources we currently should spend somewhere else - but I guess, that if this is the case, we have a different kind of problem.
What software should be used to best facilitate this?
I can think of the following right now:
make it part of the website
translation is already set-up here (do we want this for a weekly news blog, though?)
markdown in a specific git repo (+ publishing of the markdown to a dedicated auxolotl sub-page)
part of the Wiki
this would not require any additional setup
is also markdown
Would this also be a good medium for the core team to post broader announcements regarding project governance and such?
Good question. I’m unsure between:
not having too many forums/websites/etc to keep up with
being able to keep up with specifically the broader announcements only
I currently tend to think the latter is more important.
Haha the timing for this could not be better. The staff were actually discussing this ourselves. Below is a little extract of the logs.
isabel: auxpkgs.news coming soon?! jakehamilton: Sooon! I would imagine an official weekly.auxolotl.org would be cool coded: True. I wonder if we make a blog that’s managed by marketing or steering? jakehamilton: I think Marketing would be the place to delegate that responsibility. Perhaps with an occasional contribution from Steering for large announcements. coded: Yeah, maybe have some kind of tag to say who it’s by. isabel: To be honest, it would be more like an announcements page since we don’t experience many PRs. So more like a devlog, I guess. coded: True. isabel: I quite like this idea actually. isabel: Actually, on that note, I’m happy to make a write-up in 2+ days or so since I will be done with my Java assignment. coded: That’d be great
So i guess I’m writing the first one in a few days.
These are some valid concerns. And I think that the weekly is a good idea since it would break up a lot of this issue since that’s where most people would go actually looking for information. And when the matrix becomes open that will act as a main chat platform, leaving the forum more as a place for help and some misc other topics.
My hope for this would be that it wouldn’t take up any additional resources outside of maybe the marketing SIG, and that people could contribute what they want to add to it at their own leisure and discretion, with the post author/editors filling in the gaps where necessary.
I also agree that splitting information across multiple locations is problematic, but I think this would moreso serve as an end-of-the-week recap of what has already happened and been discussed thoroughly on the forums and such. I think not much ‘new’ information would be distributed via the weekly posts.
Apparently there is a Discourse feature for embedded comments which, when paired with any typical static site generator, will automatically create a topic for new posts. This might be good to use not only to have a comment section on the posts, but also just to “bridge” the Discourse with the blog.
i’d really recommend against putting anything discourse-related on our main site due to their weird takes on web performance. i think we should let discourse just do what it does best and have it be forum software without loading 5mb of JS on another, otherwise static, site.
I’m thinking Hugo for the SSG, it seems fully featured and easy to work with, but I’ve only used it a small bit in the past. Does anyone else have a different preference?
Ah, I totally forgot that the main site was using Astro! It’s probably better for maintaining consistency to use the same thing here. One question though; Hugo allows you to set draft: true in the post’s header, which lets you continuously edit it in place and rebuild the site without it being published to the site until you change it to false. I really enjoyed the simplicity of this when using Hugo, Does Astro have an equivalent sort of function?
