On 05/17/2016 10:21 AM, Bryan Richter wrote: > Website work is blocked on taking care of the blog, so let's do that. > We have to make some decisions, but first we need to agree on what > purpose we are trying to achieve. > > To frame the "purpose" discussion, I'll pose the first question: Where > does the blog live? The decision flowchart starts with: > > 1. Blog lives on the main site > 2. Blog lives somewhere else > > Which shall it be? >
My values: * When Snowdrift.coop makes a careful decision about how to do something like blogging, we at least consider how we can make it as easy as possible for other projects to follow the same path (that's why having it on the site for *any* project was originally proposed, because I hate the idea that we do a ton of work and then conclude that any FLO project has to reproduce all that same work themselves, I want to lower the barriers to FLO project success) * I want updates and blog things to be conceptually connected to patronage enough that patrons and potential patrons feel well-informed about the work their patronage supports * I want a good blog for our own purposes for various reasons. None of those require the blog being on the main site. If we decided to use Ghost (one of the blog options more appealing to me as an end user and in particularly liking the project and the project's values), and we had a link to our blog on the main site (perhaps even a feed with titles in a side-bar on the project, but not strictly necessary), and we made it clear to other projects how to easily get set up with Ghost, then it could address all my concerns. Now, my *ideal* for blog software has certain features I'd want including all the FLO ideals like working with LibreJS, working with NoScript, having no privacy-invading analytics, having threaded 100% FLO discussion section that has the full honor-system concepts, and so on. I prefer this to be upstream rather than invent our own blogging software, I just don't trust most upstream things to respect all these values, so it's a trade-off. I could imagine a Ghost blog that doesn't have direct discussions on each page but instead links to a discussion topic for each post on a Discourse forum that we have set up as best as we can to use our honor-system. That said, I'm not set on Ghost, it's just an example. It may or may not be overkill. I defer to operations people somewhat. I have a biased weak liking of having our stack be consolidated as much as possible and use single-sign-on etc. whatever that means for our choices. > But let's not simply answer that question. Let's start by > understanding why we have a blog, and figure out what we need to make > it a success. From there, it should be easier to agree on this > decision, and the ones that follow. > > Here's my brainstorm for the blog's purpose: > > 1. Show signs of life > 2. Keep people engaged > 3. Talk about problems we're facing > 4. Talk about progress we've made > 5. Add more content to the Internets, making it easier for people > to find us in searches > > All those values are good. I'd add: * Provide more personal sense to things with posts introducing team members and discussing the project from a personal level (blog posts have specific authors) versus wiki articles that don't work like that. * Write about updates including references to new wiki articles and other things in order to promote our FLO values etc * After launch, write highlight other projects that use the system
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