[plug] LinmagAU Wiki

[Sham Chukoury]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 10:58, senectus wrote:
> Uh.. I'm not sure this is such a good idea..
> We had set out to lighten the load of a currently up and running "blog/news
> site", not redesign it from the ground up...
> 
> I think its ok how it is.. we just need to "distribute" the administrative
> load.....

Yeah, I agree that distributing the administrative load is the main goal
of this process. But the fact is that different styles of content
management systems affect the way they can be 'distributively
administered'. That is, some CMS's are designed to be administered by a
single person - so issues that might come up when more than one person
administer the system haven't been factored into the design. :)

It might be great to simply nominate more than one admin person for
linmagau, to sorta distribute the admin load, somehow. It might even be
great to throw all kinds of technological toys at the problem - wikis,
all kinds of collaborative authoring systems... But I don't believe any
such measures will provide a viable long term solution to the problem.
:P I believe that those who believe linmagau is a good thing, and that
it needs to live on, need to come together and focus on the key issues
affecting linmagau, before coming up with the appropriate set of
administrative and technological solutions.

There are a number of issues at stake here:
- content authoring/submission
- content editing and publishing
- news tracking - announcements and events
- copyright hassles (getting permission to publish stuff)
- members and forums
- security, maintenance & updates

- Content authoring/submission, editing and publishing
This is the main thing that linmagau does - provides a medium for people
to write about Linux and FOSS in Australia. We need to think about this
publishing process - here are some key questions:
- Who writes what?
  - Do we just accept anything anyone writes?
    - What is the 'acceptance criteria'?
  - Do we have regular 'columns' on certain topics?
- Do submissions go straight into the site, via a submission form? 
  - Or do they get put in some sort of editing queue, waiting for
editorial review and publishing approval?
  - Or are they meant to come in via e-mail?
    - Who receives the e-mails?
- What about categorisation? (setting content to belong to particular
content categories)
- What about format?
  - Should linmagau go back to monthly editions?
  - Should linmagau be more of a slashdot or newsforge style site,
constantly announcing new info?
  - Should linmagau maybe have weekly editions? (fortnightly?) (instead
of monthly editions...)

- News tracking - announcements and events
This is a key part of integrating linmagau with the various LUGs/FOSS
SIGs around Australia, by providing a single point of information about
events affecting the various groups.
- Should someone subscribe to ALL of the relevant mailing lists, and
report interesting stuff to linmagau?
- Should linmagau have a number of 'correspondents' subscribed to any
number of those lists, reporting interesting stuff?
- Should linmagau aggregate information flowing on the many different
lists?
  - What could linmagau do with the aggregated info?

- Copyright hassles
Alas, not all information available on the web, or through other
sources, is free for someone to grab and republish. People involved in
maintaining linmagau need to take on the responsibility of contacting
copyright owners and requesting publishing permission. Alternatively, if
an article writer is submitting an article with copyrighted content,
he/she could clear up the copyright permission issues, before submitting
the content.

- Members and forums
Readers could sign up to be 'members' and receive news and notifications
about what is going on with linmagau... Perhaps most useful if linmagau
has a periodical (week/fortnight/month-ly) format - to announce new
stories. Forums could provide places for discussion of linmagau stories,
and be moderated by a number of people. Questions:
- What would members do for linmagau? (and vice versa) i.e. what would
be the relationship between members and linmagau, other than a simple (I
belong) membership relationship...

- Security, maintenance & updates
Linmagau should have at least one person making sure the whole
publishing machinery is working in top condition. Issues:
- Customising scripts to work better for linmagau.
  - Making sure customisations do not compromise security.
- Tracking security issues that might arise, due to the current CMS in
use.
  - updating the CMS as needed.

So it looks like the content bit can be managed quite effectively using
some sort of ready-made CMS, while most other things mostly need to be
handled by people. I don't think a CMS (whether it be wiki, *nuke, or
Mir/activismo) can be chosen to be the 'right' one for linmagau, until
the questions I asked above (about content), are properly resolved. I
reckon it would be rather foolish to choose some kind of CMS first, then
heavily customising it and/or trying to fit linmagau around it, rather
than the other way round.

Going back to the 'not redesigning from the ground up' argument... I'm
afraid that, in the process of distributing the administrative load,
those who do take on the load, would find the current setup rather
inconvenient and would end up redesigning anyway. (see 'trying to fit
linmagau around CMS' comment above) That's especially since the current
setup is such that it was mostly one person doing most of the work. What
I'm getting at, is that the tech side (the setup) is *not* completely
independent of the people/administrative side, and that it needs to fit
the people, rather than the other way round.

Food for thought. To be consumed at moderate pace, chew thoroughly.
§:)