Idea: Using Fridge Blog As A Showcase For Non-Members

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 8:35 AM, José Antonio Rey <jose at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, I don't believe this is a good idea. Currently, the Fridge
> serves as a source for important news and announcements inside the Ubuntu
> community. Adding guest contributor posts would remove that value.

Right, the Fridge is intentionally a low-traffic site for Ubuntu
project announcements. While I wouldn't mind seeing the traffic be a
bit more than 1-2 posts per week, I'm inclined to have it retain the
original purpose because it is a valuable and effective resource
(anecdotal data from people I meet and tell me so, we haven't done a
survey lately and my requests for actual traffic data on
Canonical-hosted sites have not been successful).

But the proposal seems to be more planet-like personal posts from
individual non-member contributors about work they're doing?

> However, having guest posts on the planet is a great idea. I, myself, have
> done it in the past. Maybe opening a site specifically for this would be
> great.

If my assumption above is correct, I'd agree here.

Now, there used to be a non-member Ubuntu Planet run by a 3rd party,
and it shouldn't be too hard to bring one of those online.

If the problem is that these folks don't have blogs (if they did, I
imagine they'd link to those blog posts in their membership
application?) a planet won't work. In that case I think a separate
website for sharing guest posts from contributors would be useful, or
if the insights.ubuntu.com folks are comfortable using that (though
that always seemed to be a highly-curated Canonical marketing site).

I guess this leads to another question: do we actually have
contributors who are not members but are clamoring to tell their
stories on a platform within the community because they lack one? We
don't want to create a resource that's a ghost town, I think that's
why the original non-member Planet became defunct.

> Regarding the email address, there's always
> ubuntu-news-team at lists.ubuntu.com. People can link us to their blog posts
> and we can include them on the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

Yes! I want to encourage folks to send to that list when they have
article ideas for Fridge or want to include things in in UWN. We're
all volunteers on the Ubuntu News Team and only know about the news we
find, stumble upon or are told about :)

And I'm looping in that list to that thread, since the rest of the
news team should know this discussion is happening so they can chime
in too.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2