On 01 May 2004, at 00:15, Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Sending announcements to -users doesn't seem more appropriate to me than spamming grabbed email addresses.
It does to me, since the lists are the fabric of our community. Just add some [ADD] prefix to the subject and its purpose would be quite clear. If you send irrelevant information, you'll be flamed on the spot. :-)
You're right. Irrelevant and aggressive announcement will be flamed right away, quickly leading to self regulation.
Another option could be to have some commercial news section on our website, perhaps also with some RSS feeds. Anyone who would like to be included on that page needs to send his announcement/article/whatever to the PMC and the PMC checks whether the announcement is relevant/applicable.
Having a section on commercial offering is good (we already have it somehow), but what's needed is something more "proactive" to notify people of upcoming events such as these training sessions, and I don't think people are looking the website in search of regularily updated data. Sure, a RSS feed would help, but how much will subscribe to this feed?
IMO, a good balance can be to have a combination of both: a short announcement on the mailing-list inviting interested people to visit a web page, be it on the Apache site or not. We have to be careful though about hosting such announcements on the Apache server as it may look like an endorsement from the PMC, and thus lead to frictions between those that have the PMC's agreement and those that don't have it. It's not the PMC job to select commercial offerings around Cocoon, although it can be considered its responsibility to pay back active contributors by giving them more visibility. Not that easy.
WDYT?
Ah, and I also apologize for those who are disapointed because they have _not_ received the spam ;-)
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
