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
News Requirements
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)
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.
Name brainstorming
Because we can't call it FooBar forever.
- furchtbar
- fruitbar
- crème brûlée
- furth3r or just further
- Fedora News
- Fedora Radar
- Fedora Sonar
- Fedora Reach
- Fedora Insight
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.)
