UbuntuNews

Summary

This spec outlines the plans to unify the mailing lists and resources used by all the various initiatives dealing with news in the Ubuntu community, to provide them with single resources and to assist the people dealing with them to share efforts and work more efficiently.

Rationale

There are a number of different news-related projects in the Ubuntu community. Examples are:

Currently these projects are fragmented - the Fridge has its own mailing list where stories are submitted and discussed; the Newsletter is dealt with by the marketing team (which is not an intuitive team to be dealing with it); the Magazine has its own resources; and the website is worked on privately by the Ubuntu webmaster. This causes a certain amount of inefficiency.

This specification intends to provide a single set of resources for these teams to discuss and forage for news in and around the Ubuntu community and formulate appropriate stories.

It does not intend to unify the projects or disturb the workflows of any of the groups of people working on each initiative.

Use Cases

Elizabeth comes across a story on Planet Ubuntu which is newsworthy. She is unsure of which particular initiative might be interested in it, and mails it separately to the Fridge editors and the marketing team for inclusion in the newsletter.

Isaac is an Ubuntu community member and is interested in contributing to the weekly newsletter. He is not interested in marketing as a concept and is surprised to find that the weekly newsletter comes within the competence of the marketing team.

Design

One single mailing list for anyone to submit/suggest stories for any of the various news initiatives and discussion of them. The various editors of the projects can then discuss whether the particular story is appropriate for their particular project, and proceed accordingly.

Implementation

Create a new mailing list at:

The list should be open to anyone to subscribe to. This has the beneficial side effect that discussions about the Fridge and UWN are open to all community members. Members of fridge-devel should be automatically subscribed to the new list, and the existing fridge-devel and the ubuntu-marketing-submissions list should be deprecated.

Advertise this new list as a place for anyone to post stories or news items which might be worthy for consideration on the Fridge, UWN, the Ubuntu website, and so on.

Establish #ubuntu-news irc channel, and make #ubuntu-fridge redirect there.

The existing projects should keep their existing editorial structure. See Fridge and UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/EditingPolicies.

Launchpad team - the team at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-news/ should be used as an umbrella team to contain teams working on the new ubuntu-news-team mailing list, such as the teams working on UWN and the Fridge.

Outstanding Issues

  • Some Fridge contributors have raised the question of whether a separate list will be required to discuss issues which are specific to the Fridge, such as theme or UI changes to the website.
    • This will be reevaluated after implementation of the specification to determine whether a separate "Fridge" list would be helpful or not.

  • Who will have the password for this new list? Who will be listed as the list administrators? Will this group include the admins of the current lists? -- CodySomerville 2008-05-28 21:02:06

Comments/Discussion

See the /talk page.

CategorySpec CategoryUbuntuTeams

UbuntuNews (last edited 2008-08-06 16:41:35 by localhost)