On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 04:42:28PM -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote:
That being said, I'm skeptical about the realism / helpfulness of
such meetings. Is it frequent that a writer gets to commit an item
and realizes someone else just wrote it?
Not at all. It's true the contrary, sadly :)
I wasn't aware that the DPN was written at the last minute until
David noted it.
Yeah, it's our Friday night party: generally me, David and Cédric trying
to cook it before Saturday. We generally finish it at midnight (european
time) or later.
What is causing this? Are we short on manpower so
everyone waits hoping that someone else will write before? Or are
writers just waiting as much as possible so they don't need to
update an entry about an ongoing event?
I can't speak for David or Cédric (even if I think that at least David's
case is similar to mine) but my "Debian" time is often quite full of
things to do. Sometimes I can manage to write a couple of paragraphs of
DPN during the week, but if I have also an announcement to do, it ends up
that I have simply not enough time to dedicate to DPN.
On the other hand (and note that this it is just a sensation, I could be
wrong) there are a lot of people who would like to contribute but they
simply don't know how to do it. Or they'd need a bit of
tutoring/mentoring.
I know this because when I started I had no idea how to write something
in DPN (and for a not native speaker could sound really scary to write
something from scratch in English): it was just hanging around in IRC, on
the tail of Alexander and David that I learnt.
There are a lot of tasks for newbie: for instance, take care of the
"Upcoming events" section (collecting data from some specific sources I
listed here [1]), adding interesting news to the TODO list for the
current release (there's even a google alert for Debian related news,
with reports available via this mailing list [2]), write the easier
paragraph (did you notice? when we mention a Debian announcement or a
Debian update on DPN we re-use the first paragraph of the announcement
itself), etc.
The purpose of the meeting is to help tutoring newbies and better
distribute the work.
And, btw, yes: I know for sure that there are people who want to
contributes (did you remember the call for help of the publicity team
some months ago? a *lot* of people replied).
So, I'd really like to try something new, and regular meetings are one of
the options. :)
I've also set up a first draft of todo list - still really general and
I'm not fully convinced of it, but I'm exploring possibilities - on
gobby.debian.org for the publicity team (under the Teams/Publicity dir).
If you prefer we can use gobby instead of IRC.
Cheers,
Francesca