On 20/04/2021 12.40, Steven Smith wrote:
That’s begging the question of an effective communications strategy. A
distributed model of random volunteers is perfect for aggregating git commits.
It’s highly ineffective at communicating important news from that organization.
If MacPorts wants to communicate better, it must post important announcements
like “MacPorts supports the new Apple silicon M1” at a MacPorts website, and
someone with a macports.org address must send emails to a few tech reporters
that say “look at this please.”
If you pledge to handle this kind of marketing, I would have no problem to hand
out an @macports.org address for that. By the way, having our own mail domain is
not that common for open source projects. Most projects hosted on services such
as GitHub/GitLab/etc. will never have that. I really do not think it is of that
much significance.
We would be grateful if more users/contributors could join the boat
and actively help in areas where they feel that they could contribute
to the project (in one way or another).
That’s precisely why a more effective and realistic commutations strategy is
desirable.
I don't disagree. But it needs at least one person invested enough to start it
and then some more to follow-through with it.
If someone is willing to step up and write blog posts, articles
(potentially based on a few rounds of questions/answers/document
revisions), etc., that would certainly be more than welcome.
I’d wager that many people would write these, but the channel and
infrastructure for this do not now exist: no MacPorts News/Announcements page,
no blog page, a somnambulant Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/macports, and no
peer review control mechanism. This can be accomplished by providing such tools
to divide-and-conquer, with an open peer review mechanism for contributors
without commit authority.
We have the news section on the website [1]. Posts can be submitted with pull
requests to the corresponding repository [2]. At the moment, it is only in use
for release announcements that are also posted on macports-announce [3]. I don't
think anyone would object against posting more.
I know the Twitter account is not as active as it could be. I personally do not
find the time to post there regularly. I can grant you access to the account
through TweetDeck if you want to make it more active. There is a list of people
with access on the SocialMedia wiki page [4]. Currently the only rule is that
tweets should have a signature by their author.
As you can see, some infrastructure exists. It needs community members to step
up and provide content to fill these channels.
Rainer
[1] https://www.macports.org/news/
[2] https://github.com/macports/macports.github.io
[3] https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-announce/
[4] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SocialMedia
