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Maemo Weekly News

File:MWkN-logo.png

Background

There are a lot of facets to the Maemo community, whether it's Bugzilla, maemo-developers, #maemo, Planet, Talk or Brainstorm. With the N900 and Maemo 5, there's been a noticeable increase in traffic in all these areas.

There have been suggestions of Maemo magazines before, but they've fallen over because:

1. The people involved haven't been integrated into the community.
2. They've been a lot of work to create.
3. They tried to move away from maemo.org/news/

Similarly, there are blogs (like Reggie's Maemo Talk) which highlight key important things; but some of them also suffer from the same problems above.

With the increase in volume, and limits on my own time, I'm finding it harder to be aware of all the things going on. In particular, little asides and so on on talk which are key to the community, but buried in a thread. The old complaint of "too much happening outside of talk.maemo.org" is now reversed, IMHO, but the SNR is too low to follow "New Posts" religiously *and* develop software at the same time.

Idea

A weekly news digest of key useful/informative/interesting/insightful news from all Maemo news sources. Similar in style and approach to Linux Weekly News.

This is, in many ways, a continuation of Ryan's "Community Highlights" but doing less work, being more encompassing and more repeatable.

This is NOT an attempt to aggregate ALL Maemo-related news, but provide a selection of highlights during the week; of interest to those who are involved in the platform and the community, but without the time to follow enough of the conversations in all the places to find the ones interesting to them. By acting as a filter, more people will be able to be involved in the things which interest them, resulting in an increase of higher quality submissions for members of the community who might not be heard from as much.

Implementation

The key to its success is to produce something which is useful, integrated and deterministic; but without being a massive resource hog.

Produced weekly, every week, with a series of sections - probably similar to those on tmo. Something like:

• Front page
• Applications
• Development
• Community
• Devices
• Maemo in the Wild
• ...

To gather the news, a series of sub-editors/contributors would have access to a Twitter account (@mwkn). The posts to this feed would consist of the section, a few keywords and a link to the content (thread, post, email message, blog) which triggered it. For example, recently this may include:

 Applications - wazd helping qwerty12 on Transmission: http://s56.radikal.ru/i152/0911/34/a388e13890a0.png
 Devices - Release firmware available to download: http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/maemo-5-final-release-updated-sdk-and-firmware/
 Community - Move official community discussion to tmo: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40526

Anyone would be able to suggest content by directing a message @mwkn from their own Twitter accounts. The sub-editors would then be able to pick and choose from these if it's something they'd missed.

As each issue is being pulled together, one or more sub-editors would then review the posts to that Twitter feed for their sections and flesh it out with a longer paragraph/quote. Full-blown stories would also be possible, but I imagine that being a rarity (if ever). There would then be an overall editor(s) making sure there's no duplication and also including things from maemo.org/downloads/ (top 10 apps, and new apps this week) and the bug jars (top 10 activity, probably).

The completed digest would then be posted to a site and the front page syndicated to Planet and a thread opened at talk.maemo.org.

Hopefully this shouldn't be too much work; and sub-editors/contributors would be able to post to the feed during their daily review of their slice of the community.

To collect the sub-editors, I'd suggest a recruitment & screening process of the form "what 3 would you have done for last week?" See more details below.

People

Contributors

Well-respected members of the community to volunteer to highlight content they see during their Maemo day. This could be whilst sat on IRC, reading the mailing lists, watching maemo.org/news/, contributing on Brainstorm or reading Talk. The only extra work should be to use their favourite Twitter client to post links that should be in the digest.

• Tim Samoff
• Aniello Del Sorbo
• Andrea Grandi
• Uwe Kaminski

Sub-editors

Contributors who are also willing to flesh out the links each week by selecting a representative quote. We will have the tools in place to make this as easy as possible, see below.

Editors

The people with ultimately responsibility. The sub-editors who make sure the whole thing is consistent.

• Andrew Flegg
• User:reggieReggie Suplido

Technical implementation

Sebastian Lauwers has volunteered to assist with the website tooling. The key to the success of MWkN is streamlined tooling and process to make the editions as easy to pull together as possible.

Imagine an issue being put together as:

1. Log in.
2. Open the current in-progress digest to edit.
3. Select a section from a drop-down. A list of Twitter posts from the MWkN account in that section appears in a side-bar.
4. Each Twitter post can be clicked on to add the lead-in text, an appropriate quote and any lead-out text necessary.
5. Items can then be dragged on to the section, and re-ordered. Possibly with WYSWIWYG editing. (i.e. steps 4 & 5 could be combined)
6. Changes are instanta-save and, ideally, shared between any sub-editors looking at the section (one step at a time).

Using lots of tools like JQuery and YUI! to make it really quick and simple to flesh out a few links into a paragraph each and pull each section together.

So, for example, the links above:

<h3>wazd helping qwerty12 on Transmission</h3>
<p><span class="lead-in"><a href="http://maemo.org/profile/view/wazd/" class="user" title="wazd">Andrew Zhilin</a>, our prolific community graphic designer, is helping <a href="http://maemo.org/profile/view/qwerty12" class="user" title="qwerty12">Faheem Pervez</a> with the UI for his port of
Transmission, a Bittorrent client; allowing the user to download (legal) content from various places on the Internet.</span></p>
<div class="link"><a href="http://s56.radikal.ru/i152/0911/34/a388e13890a0.png">Read more</a></div>

<h3>Summit N900 owners rejoice: release firmware available to download</h3>
<p><span class="lead-in">Those of us who received loan devices at the
Maemo Summit have been using pre-production firmware; until
now:</span> <span class="quote">The Nokia N900 is landing in the hands
of real users with the Maemo 5 final release that we have been
polishing in the last weeks. The fortunate users of a pre-production
Nokia N900 are encouraged to flash completely their devices in order
to have them as they come out of a sales box.</span> <span
class="lead-out">Simultaneously released is the final release SDK,
allowing developers to run the same environment  on their device and
in Scratchbox.</a></p>
<div class="link"><a
href="http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/maemo-5-final-release-updated-sdk-and-firmware/">Read
more</a></div>