James Polley <ja...@polley.org> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Heracles <herac...@iprimus.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Also, SLUG should consider producing a magazine for members filled with
>> articles from members including tutorials, reviews of open source software
>> and code snippets, updates on what members are working on and some
>> basics. It could become a benefit of membership. It could be emailed as a
>> pdf to financial members at their slug.org.au email address.
>
> Interesting idea.
>
> I see one major problem and one major ideological issue though.
>
> The problem is the same one we have with talks: you can't have content
> without someone taking the time to produce the content. We have enough
> trouble now just trying to round up two people to give a talk every
> month; I can't imagine getting written content would be any easier.
>
> On the other hand, a short article might be easier to produce than a
> 45-minute talk - and there's no public speaking required, which no
> doubt would make it easier for some people to participate.
For what it is worth[1], my experience is that getting people to produce a
*good* written article is much, much harder than getting a good talk out of
them. (A good talk is hard to get, incidentally.)
When you present you have feedback, and can see if your audience is falling
asleep because you are telling them what they already know, or if they are
confused because they don't understand a single word you say.[2]
In writing you start with tighter constraints on presentation, since written
language is much less forgiving and much more formal than spoken language.
Add to that the need to use a suitable typesetting system, a vocabulary that
benefits from hypertext and demands complex presentation[3], and you are
setting a pretty high bar to get a good result.
So, yeah, it makes it easier for some people to participate — but I don't
think that you get much benefit from that. Writing complex and explanatory
documents is hard work for people who do it regularly, let alone those of us
who mostly write in less format settings.
> If we could get the content I like this idea - except for the "Emailed as a
> PDF" bit. I think there are much better ways we could present this: for
> instance, an area of the SLUG website only accessible by financial members;
> or even a simple private mailing list.
Doing the later seems, to me, to be duplicating the strategy of LWN. They do
OK with it, apparently, which is a positive. The negative, of course, is that
their potential paying audience is about an Internet-million[4] times
bigger...
If I was pitching this sort of idea I would probably approach Linux Australia
with the idea of running it as an Australia-wide publication under their
banner.
Then you could approach all the different LUGs around the country, and perhaps
also NZ, to expand both your contributor-base and your audience.
Of course, if I was pitching it I would also go spend a lot of hours talking
to people who had published tech magazines over the years. Incidentally,
these days none of them are. Every single tech magazine they worked for went
bust in the end...
Finally, keep in mind that having the magazine is going to demand an editorial
staff to produce it. That is a *huge* amount of hard work, even for something
that only sees electronic distribution.
[...]
> There are compromises of course; I believe the SAGE-AU mailing list archives
> used to be members-only for 6 months and then released to the public
> (although now it seems the archives are completely members-only). We could
> perhaps investigate something similar.
SAGE-AU have been facing something of the same crisis y'all did here, although
more serious since they are aiming at higher goals of business-relevance.
Their exec are nice people, though, and will almost certainly tell you about
their experience with the changes, and why they made the decisions they did.
Daniel
Incidentally, before someone comes to the clever idea: if y'all do decide to
do a magazine, and you do decide to reuse content from the mailing list, make
sure you get appropriate licensing.
Which, in turn, means you get a real copyright lawyer to OK your strategy.
Nothing sucks worse than republishing, as an example[5], my content, then
finding out that I deliver a demand for significant licensing fees from you,
backed up with my own lawyer and legal threats.[6]
Footnotes:
[1] ...especially as I am nothing but a freeloader on the mailing
list, and only there because I find the variety of discussions in
multiple LUGs more likely to produce something interesting.
[2] Ever *bad* presenters have a vague awareness of this, although they might
not recover well or change approach to reflect it.
[3] Doing *good* layout of either GUI or command-line examples is hard.
Good layout for things like configuration ... ouch.
[4] In other words: "much bigger, but I don't know how much."
[5] ...using me as the subject of it, in the hope that won't offend anyone
terribly or anything like that.
[6] In practise I would probably only ask for appropriate author credit,
a surety of editorial control over my own writing, and either
industry-standard rates or a free membership.[7]
[7] Well, unless the success of the magazine was beyond my wildest imaginings
of how well the best case ever could go. ;)
--
✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ dan...@rimspace.net ☎ +61 401 155 707
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