Hi Adam and all -- Great points and this is what I was trying to suggest as well in my response to JonRob. What we do in FWN is very much marketing-oriented, in the sense that we're trying to aggregate and summarize information from a wide variety of sources, about Fedora. I think ideally a beat should cover material from multiple sources, as you suggest. Dale does a good job of this with his virt beat. I tried to do something similar with the OLPC beat for a brief time. It takes much more work to cover additional sources and integrate this down to a beat, but I do think its something we should strive for. To do so, we'd need more writers and perhaps a less regular publishing frequency as its a lot of work just keeping up a weekly. Good discussion here, thx for everyone's thoughts. - pascal ----- Original Message ----- From: fedora-news-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx <fedora-news-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx> To: fedora-news-list@xxxxxxxxxx <fedora-news-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sun Jul 12 04:23:22 2009 Subject: FooBar/Fedora Journal/FWN Future I have been editing the Planet beat in FWN for about 7.5 months now, and I've noticed a few things. Given the recent discussions about the future of FWN, creating a Fedora Journal/Magazine and Project FooBar, this may be a good time to share some ideas that have been ruminating in my head for a while. The Planet beat is unique in that it represents a fairly broad cross-section of not only the people in the Fedora community (developers, contributors, users, etc...) but also a diverse selection of topics. Many (most?) of the linked posts cover themes also reported by other beats. It isn't a complete duplication of effort, as topics are usually covered from different angles, but it does mean that in order to get the full picture about anything, you really need to check all of the FWN beats to see what else might have happened. So now my [potentially heretical, definitely radical] thoughts: Would it be worth discussing the format of FWN itself? What would FWN look like if it was organized around "topics" instead of "sources" (what we currently call a Beat)? (As a sidenote: The Developments beat is probably the most complicated/time consuming beat, and I'm not surprised that no one has stepped up. The bar--and the barriers to entry--are incredibly high, and it was a valuable source of information, taken from an incredibly busy mailing list that understandably can be difficult to stay on top of. What I'm proposing may also make filling this hole in FWN a little easier.) I'm not suggesting that FWN be thrown out, or even that tomorrow we turn around and redesign the whole format. But in the wider context of the FooBar discussions, and in particular the possibility of finding software that can support new workflows, this may be the best time for any sort of change, if that is something that would work. I'm really only trying to start a bigger discussion, and the above ideas are just a starting point (i.e. feel free to throw them out). But in the long run, what is FWN's purpose? I would sum it up as "summarize and share information relevant to the Fedora community" so we should do that as best we can. -Adam Batkin _______________________________________________ Fedora-news-list mailing list Fedora-news-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-news-list _______________________________________________ Fedora-news-list mailing list Fedora-news-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-news-list
