Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Re-Launch // my Introduction

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Jens Leineweber <j.leineweber at gmx.net> wrote:
> I don't know how many do know me already so I will take the chance of
> introducing myself. My name is Jens (aka. NRWlion on #ubuntu-news) [1]

I've said it before, but welcome to the team! :) Apologies for taking
so long to follow-up, I had hoped we could do a team meeting but our
schedules aren't syncing up well for that.

Not sure if you have seen it, but the team did a survey several months
back, Amber summarized the results here:

http://akgraner.com/?p=820

It's probably worth a review by all of us, there are some things I
forgot until I had another look tonight.

> 1.) The Stats Section:
>
> I agree this section is needed, BUT (!) First: assuming the template shows
> the actual sequence of topics, I would suggest that this category is the
> very end of the news!
> Reason: (Well I can only speak from my point of view here!) If I want to get
> informed about what happened in a community, then i DON'T want to read stats
> first ;) I would prefer to have an overview about general things.

I think the link above can speak to this a bit more, I'll be honest -
I never really looked at the stats so I don't have much of an opinion
as far as where they go. It may make more sense for them to go down
where the other security alerts go (which are quite easy to generate -
I don't mind doing these and I worked on a python script over the
weekend to make it even easier).

> Secondly: (and here I don't know if I am wrong so pls correct me if so!)
> Based on my knowledge keeping stats up to date is a job nobody wants in a
> news-paper. Simply because it takes a lot of time to collect and compare
> informations and numbers (which would be the exact contrary when it comes to
> simplify processes) In my opinion we should have a talk with the Heads of
> the translation and bugs team telling them, that we are simply not able to
> keep the records of stats. We should ask them to provide those stats for us
> so we simply need to c/p them into the Issue. If every Sup-Team of
> translation keeps their own stats on +/ -  translations per week and sends
> them in via mail this is - in my opinion - half an hr work for them and
> safes us some time to focus on other things.

I don't mind doing it actually, but I'm not really a news-minded
person in general :)

The only thing I currently struggle with is the translation statistics
which we haven't done a great job of keeping on top of release-wise
(not sure which release we're tracking, so it's difficult to maintain
these when our typical volunteer is absent, I've sent him an email).

> 2) _Ranking of topics within the Issue_
> Again i am basing my opinion on [2] and would suggest the following ranking:
>
> (1) Personal Introduction by the chief editor for each issue

I think it's a nice touch but we ended up dropping this lately because
none of the current editors have been interested in writing this
introduction.

> (2) General Community News
>    (1) LoCo News
>    (2) The Planet
>    (3) In the Press
>    (4) In the Blogosphere
>    (5) In other News
>    (6) Featured Podcasts

Seems fine.

> (3) Monthly Team Reports
>    (**INCLUDING THE STATS OF BUGS/TRANSLATIONS etc. etc provided by the
> teams themselves)
>
> (4) Upcoming events

For both of these we switched to just linking to pages with details,
they made the newsletter quite long (which people complained about)
and the work to put them in was tedious.

Thanks for your help!

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com