Request for Feedback on New UWN Approach

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 7:15 AM, Nathan Handler <nhandler at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> One concern about this idea that was brought up was that we currently
> don't have many people posting stories to the Fridge. Those who do
> post tend to do it at their own schedule. While implementing this new
> UWN approach would probably result in many new posts to the Fridge
> near the end of the week, I do not view this as a bad thing. While the
> ideal workflow would be to have these posts to the Fridge occur as we
> spot them throughout the week, having them at least end up there gives
> us a nice searchable archive (it is a lot easier searching and linking
> to posts on Wordpress than our brief UWN summaries).

A couple things worth considering:

1. Is it more work to write a summary than to post something to
fridge? Posting things to fridge is not simply a copy and paste, in a
perfect world you can just grab the source of a page and stick it in
but often there is some formatting clean up, thinking up tags and
categories, doing review to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Personally I only have time to collect links (and even then, barely,
and won't have time to do it every week), there is no chance I'll have
time to post everything to fridge too. I'm unconvinced this saves time
for UWN and the burden it places upon our tiny active staff of fridge
editors is tremendous.

2. Licensing. Currently for everything that's cross-posted to fridge
we either do it at the request of a blogger or it's published to a
public mailing list (which I guess we've always assumed is some kind
of public domain - mailing lists are archived by third parties
regularly). When we start cross-posting blog posts without permission
we do not have this assurance unless there is an explicit license
declared on the blog. Even though we may think we're doing them a
service by showing their content to a wider audience, I've seen
projects get in trouble for even aggregating blog content on planets
without permission, in fact I've written a cease letter on behalf of a
group whose content was being aggregated without permission (they gave
attribution and links back, but we didn't want our content copied
under any circumstance since in that case it looked like our content
being there was some kind of implicit support of their organization).
Asking for and receiving permission for every blog article adds yet
another time sink.

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