Collaboration of the publicity team to the Debian timeline (Re: transfer debian-timeline/timeline.d.n maintenance to publicity team?)

[Filipus Klutiero <chealer@gmail.com>]

Hi Chris, publicity team,

On 2011-01-29 23:45, Paul Wise wrote:

Hi Chris, -publicity,

I recently noticed that the debian-timeline package, times.debian.net
and the git repository haven't received any updates in a while. I was
thinking that it might be a good idea to transfer maintenance of this
to the Debian publicity team. Do you have any thoughts on this?

the last edition of Debian Project News mentioned debian-timeline, which prompted me to look at it. The timeline is nice. But:

1. It appears to be largely unknown. As Stefano said, we should expose it more.
2. There is a pretty good coverage of the period during which I was involved in Debian, but 2010 is a little less covered, and 2011 is clearly less covered.

When I noticed 2, I thought a collaboration between Chris and the publicity team would be great, and prepared to propose that until I searched the web and realized that was precisely proposed by Paul Wise almost a year ago. Chris, did you miss this thread :-?
The main maintenance challenge of debian-timeline is clearly to keep adding new events, which requires a close monitoring of the project. Fortunately, the publicity team, which is responsible for the Debian Project News, is already doing that. I believe everything mentioned in the timeline should be covered in DPN. Consequently, a simple way to keep the timeline up-to-date would be to monitor the DPN and to filter which news are important enough for the timeline. We could either name a responsible for that, a contact point as Stefano proposed, or go decentralized and just make sure most writers have commit access and have everyone add their own stories. Another way which seems simpler would be to transfer the timeline to the publicity team (you're welcome to participate in the team if you wish, of course).

The timeline currently has:

Email corrections and additions to: lamby@debian.org.

I for one have a very low trust in requests to write to private mailboxes (and still low trust when these are debian.org mailboxes). I recommend to request proposals via the ITS instead. Also, this kind of request may give a reader running stable the impression that he's looking at the latest version. By the way, if we have timeline.debian.net, it seems the debian-timeline package could link to it to offer an up-to-date version.
An alternative to one ticket per proposal that I think could work would be to have a wiki page collecting proposed additions. Proposed entries could be written collaboratively and commented.

As for point 1, perhaps a first step would be to move timeline.debian.net to debian.org? Or ask the web team where the timeline could fit. I see a link to our history document from http://www.debian.org/intro/about.en.html#history