Hi! Looking at the archive of the -news mailing list[1], you might have already guessed: Debian's Publicity Team *is* alive and it is quite active! But there's some confusion recently, on what we do, how we do it, and -- most importantly -- how to interact with us. So, here's a small introduction from us. [1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-news/> Who are we? ----------- The Publicity Team[2] is an open team helping to make Debian known to more people. Currently we mostly do so by drafting press announcements and publishing a biweekly newsletter, the Debian Project News[3] (aka DPN). [2] <http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity> [3] <http://www.debian.org/News/project/> We also work as the marketing arm of Debian by publicizing how Debian gets created and acting as a liaison with the wider world. Other areas we contribute to are working with the press, helping Debian Developers broadcast their progress, and supporting the Debian Project Leader, or any other Debian Developer, with communication tasks. In many ways Debian is the _how_ of Free Software, not just the _why_. Debian Publicity hopes to demonstrate the practical aspects of Free Software, how a large disparate community can work together motivated by a common cause. Debian is a project with many voices, and the Debian Publicity Team hopes to provide a channel for those voices: we help you to get your message out to many people. How you can help ---------------- What you can do to help: * Get in touch with us on debian-publicy@lists.debian.org or #debian-publicity when you have a Debian announcement to send out * Suggest ideas and links for the next DPN * Draft paragraphs for the next DPN, see http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute for details; note that Debian Developers can directly commit to our "drafting area" of the Project News * Proofread the next DPN (we usually call for reviews on the debian-i18n and debian-l10n-english lists) * Promote Debian by using our marketing resources, see http://wiki.debian.org/Promote * Volunteer to start blog.debian.org, see discussion started with http://lists.debian.org/20100719132407.GA26626@upsilon.cc * Translate the DPN into your language * Help us setup the infrastructure required to have a useful presence on identi.ca and other social networks, see discussion at http://lists.debian.org/20100809184657.GB29589@rivendell * Suggest dents/tweets for our identi.ca account, see http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/Identica * Help us, to fix the existing RSS Feeds and add missing RSS feeds into our Website (requires some perl know how, and a bit knowledge on how our website works) * We also try to create a database with interested journalists. So if you are one (or know one) please contact us. * Participate in the "This Week in Debian" podcast. See http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian for details. How to use our "services" ------------------------- So, how exactly can you do that? Well, for a starter, let's face a sad but true fact: while the publicity team is quite active, we can't be everywhere, so an important point is to notify us about all the interesting things in the wider Debian world. We probably already know about the latest release Debian made, but we can't read all blog posts, mailing lists and news sites. A good example is [4], where Roman Khomasuridze noticed, that a derivative of a derivative published a Debian based version, named some of the reasons, and also got positive feedback from the users for this. That will surely make it into the next issue of the Debian Project News, so thanks Roman for notifying us :) [4] <http://lists.debian.org/AANLkTi=t2UoN82JdHF5QBF9TG9WjWOKRGrip+KPP0jGr@mail.gmail.com> So let's assume you are about to blog about something interesting you just did. When you blog about it, you consider it interesting enough, for others to know, don't you? So why not reach out to even more people, by getting it mentioned in the next Debian Project News? So you should get in contact with us. Maybe you can even prepare a small paragraph summarizing what you did? You are about to write an email to debian-devel-announce? Consider whether the topic is important enough to be covered both with a press announce for the wider audience, and with a separate mail to d-d-a containing informations for Debian's contributors (see for example the recent backports.debian.org example). If yes, get in touch with us before sending your mail out. The important point is the "before sending". When you have already sent your mail to the debian-devel-announce mailing list, or when your blog post has already hit planet.debian.org, it's too late for the Press team to act. No time to draft anything, not to speak of getting it reviewed, added and built on our web pages and sent out via mail. If your announcement does not need its own press release but is still relevant to a large set of people, feel free to drop a mail with a short introduction and a link that we can integrate into the next DPN. From time to time it happens that you would like to announce something, which shouldn't be disclosed in advance (e.g. by discussing it on a public mailing list). In these cases you can get in contact with press@debian.org; it's a private alias read by a subset of the mailing list. Whatever you send there, it won't be disclosed until you tell us to do so. For future reference, the above guidelines can be found on the wiki [5]. [5] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/DeveloperInformation How to contact us? ------------------- Via email: debian-publicity@lists.debian.org IRC: #debian-publicity channel on irc.debian.org
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