Fedora Insight

Introduction

This is a project whose aims, broadly stated, are to help information dissemination about the Fedora community to the Fedora community. Better descript needed. JonRob, please help!

Current stage

Our current next step is to pick a platform. To achieve this, we need to:

• Determine requirements (owned by ianweller)
• Seek out other interested parties and have them determine requirements (owned by JonRob)

Mel Chua 21:47, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

If you make a FooBar-related page, please add [[Category:Project FooBar]] to the bottom for now, so we can properly tag things. This category will be renamed after we pick a better name for FooBar.

Background

For the F11 release cycle, Marketing switched from a task-based model to a schedule based model. This went well, allowing us to keep better in sync with what was going on and what types of information were needed to be created/put out at any given point in the cycle. However, there are still many kinks and areas for improvement as were defined in document: F11 Cycle Retrospect. Bottom line, complacency is not a formula for success and we must always be looking towards the future and improving it.

Looking forward, we have always floated the idea of having a Fedora Magazine and the going logic is that we may be able to model Fedora Marketing around such conventions which would not be dissimilar to a magazine. The focus would be not only on producing the content that is required for each release cycle but also on producing relevant and interesting content, in many forms, audio, video and text-based for the consumption of both the general Fedora community and the Open Source community at large.

Present

Currently, the state of project/community produced content is clearly scattered. We have many groups, such as Marketing, Ambassadors, Docs, Design, etc. all creating great content for a variety of different purposes. The amount of this content is effectively multiplied by how much we care to and/or use the services of the translation team to localize this content. Once this is done, there are various and sundry methods of distributing this content. We have Fedora Weekly News, Docs Beats, Fedora Planet, local ambassadors newsletters etc. There is not one central process or policy for creating content and distribution channel/plan. Also, much of our content is not clearly licensed.

Much of this content is also centered milestones and it may be possible to fit it into recurring schedule-based publication which would help overall management and tracking.

Future

There are many questions to ask. What do we want this to be? Who should the audience be? How well do we actually know our audience to make that assumption? What types of content? These questions are what we are trying to ask and answer now so we can get a solid picture of how we proceed further. We need to clearly answer these questions to clarify our goals. Goals are in the goals section below and they will and should be refined by the community as a whole.

We might want to strive for something akin to a journal style format for community created/relevant content and including Fedora Marketing content might work best. We should start by investigating sites with similar goals/audiences. We look at sites like https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter, http://fullcirclemagazine.org/, http://planet.laptop.org/, http://www.olpcnews.com/, http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ -- not to mention FWN/LatestIssue.

What we want might be a magazine, which is not really a magazine format, more journal-ish (technical, non-nephyte) but also not afraid to include some stuff for newbies, and mostly a platform where interesting content would show up for the community's consumption, which would act as a central hub.

Also, the goal should be to create something which is well laid out visually and consistent with the design teams work and general philosophy.

Goals

Centralized Content

There are too many avenues to information now, its innundating. Blogs/Planet, FWN, Ambassadors own work, etc. Also, a majority of this content is text, whereas we would like to make more multimedia content.

Content Schedule

Well established guidelines for what needs to be produced/is being worked and when it must be published by.

This also helps in running a proper marketing campaign.

Flexibility/Creativity of Presentation

Journal Format

Better able to target an audience

Standardized Feeds

One OFFICIAL Feed for each media type--audio, video, text/print

Translation/Press Distribution/Social Media Distribution

Process for getting things in Translation Queue.

Better plan with regard to something like NDN. Red Hat Intl PR is part of this

Develop strategies for syndicating media on social networks/news sites

Questions

• Who is our audience?
• What are they interested in?
• How can we better engage their interest?

Platform selection criteria

to be filled in by ianweller

Platform specs/requirements

Marketing Requirements

• Allow multiple editors
• Allow multiple contributors
• Separate feeds for different media - podcast, written, video etc
• Easy integration of rich media - see above
• Tags/Categories
• "Push" capabilities. From kanarip: if i have to look it up, as in, actively, it's a fail; it needs to be pushed in my direction somehow; rss feeds will suffice for that purpose

News Requirements

(Extrapolated from the [this fedora-news-list thread] - please correct me if I've misinterpreted. Mel Chua 18:44, 14 July 2009 (UTC))

• graphical branded presence
• syndication
• potentially retaining the FWN name? (has name recognition... open question for discussion.)
• keep current FWN sections. "Certainly Ambassadors, Planet, Art/Design, Translation, Development. Dale's virtualization beat is a creation unto itself, covering several different areas."
• easy workflow - currently, FWN is edited as one block of text, which is easier on editors than working on many separate posts.

Design requirements

• mizmo: lets you add custom CSS across the whole site design. i think its just going to be one blog (or maybe one per feed - text / audio /video ) so i dont think user level css would come into play.
• mizmo: lets you modify html output
• mizmo: tagging - to support the way we laid the mockup up, you either need multiblogs or better tagging, and tag based feeds. so like we were talking about, having a developer of the month interview, would be good to tag it with 'interview' and 'dotw', and then for each tag to have its own feed. it could be accomplished with separate blogs too, but that would then split related content, like if you had a dotw blog and an interview blog, when you do an interview for dotw it won't be in the interview blog feed

General Requirements

• FAS_Auth integration
• Themable (presumably by Design Team)
• Software *and* required plugins packaged - including theme?
  • software + plugins packaged, theme isn't necessarily a strict requires but it's kind of nice --Ian Weller 16:13, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Why is it not a strict requires? (JonRob - who doesn't know how to do ianweller's funky signiture)

This is a brainstorm list - what would you want a FooBar platform to have and do? Please add to the list below.

Platform options

This is a brainstorm list; add your ideas and notes on various platforms below. Platforms are in alphabetical order.

Drupal

• imo, way more features than we actually need. Mel Chua 15:52, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
• bad security record, the sort of PHP app that infrastructure doesn't need --Ian Weller 15:54, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
• There's no way we would put up a Drupal instance in addition to Zikula. If we can do this project with a CMS, we'll do it with Zikula, which has already been through the entire process of community requirement gathering, evaluation, and is well into testing and packaging phase. --stickster 17:47, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

OpenEMM

• this wouldn't be the FooBar platform, but instead something to support/plug-into it.
• kanarip: for sharing news and sending it around the globe (to various contacts or press-agents or whatever), may i suggest OpenEMM

Wordpress (wp)

• mizmo: i am hoping wp is chosen though because its a known quantity and [the Design team has] done themes for it before
• has it been integrated into infra's systems, and met their security/packaging requirements?

Wordpress, multiuser (wp-mu)

• ianweller: wp-mu i don't think is the right choice for foobar, it just complicates things and we don't need multiple blogs, unless of course we want to run the entire thing under the blogs.fp.o umbrella
  • which, in general, we don't. --Ian Weller 16:11, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
  • would it not be possible to take that as hosting though, and have it point to a different domain? it would give us all the power of a normal wp install, but have the happy side effect of already being deployed!
• A CMS isn't just for serving up somewhat static, undated content. It also can provide blogging capabilities as well; Zikula, Drupal, Joomla, et al., all do this just fine. --stickster 17:48, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Zikula

• stickster: there's a great deal of crossover between what Foobar proposes, and what the new CMS (Zikula) can/will accomplish. Foobar sets out a lot of Marketing-specific goals, and I think most or all of them can be achieved through an implementation via the CMS.
• ke4qqq (Dave Nalley) summarizes Zikua: After a long period of input, eval, and testing by multiple groups (primarily Docs, but also Infrastructure and others), Zikula has been chosen as a CMS. It has a responsive upstream that's developing new modules for our needs and has even joined fp lists to help us collaborate on getting this up. It wil first be used for docs.fp.o, which currently has no CMS; FPC and F-Legal are also interested in using it - but we haven't mapped out that really well thus far - but it's after docs.fp.o makes the move. polecat (John Poelstra) has stepped up to coordinate teams for a production schedule and some meetings.
• If zikula fits all of our requirements, or can/will be modified to do so, I would be strongly in favor of going with this and working with the existing cross-team effort - it just makes sense to Work Together. I think sitting down with someone who knows Zikula's feature set well, and going through our requirements list (once that is more solidified) with them, would enable us to make a final yes/no decision. Mel Chua 14:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Name brainstorming

Because we can't call it FooBar forever.

• furchtbar
• fruitbar
• crème brûlée
• furth3r or just further
• Fedora Cafe
• Fedora News
• Fedora Radar
• Fedora Sonar
• Fedora Reach
• Fedora Insight
  • "Fedora Insight" is my favorite thus far. Perfect -- provides insight into the community happenings. --stickster 12:35, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
  • +1, same reasons as Paul. Amusing bonus: we can close articles with "fi" (like a bash script's 'if' loop). Finally, here is a logo idea. Mel Chua 14:49, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Even better: use an italicized sans-serif "fi" ligature :) --Ian Weller 19:34, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
• Fedora Insider
• Fedora InSite
• The Fedora Inquirer
• Fedora Remembrall
• Fedora Pensieve
• Fedora First - it's one of the four foundations, and also has a very newsy-connotation - read about Fedora here FIRST

Upcoming things

• design (mizmo): waiting on platform selection
• getting a test version up: also waiting on platform selection

Sketches

Here's a mockup by mizmo of what this might look like. (Click for full size.)