[Bf-committers] Weekly meetings and communication channels

[Corey Richardson]

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017, at 16:48, Corey Richardson wrote:
> I created This Week in Rust and also spearheaded the transition to
> Discourse (including all the initial setup + admin). You _can_ interact with
> discourse through email, but it's somewhat clunky. Definitely less pleasant than
> 

... mailman (imo). But, a lot of people prefer the web interface anyway
and it definitely lowers the barrier to entry. It seems email is less and less
preferred among newcomers.

Here's some advice, for creating something like This Week in Blender:

- Figure out how to automate as much as possible.

This can be including a special string in commit messages
(NEWSLETTER or something), mailing list messages, phabricator
whatsnots, etc. It doesn't need to be intrusive, just machine-findable.

If you can write a script that generates the skeleton of the
newsletter from those sorts of tags, it saves a LOT of work
for the maintainer/editor.

In practice, most submissions came through IRC. Otherwise,
at first, I manually looked at the list of all pull requests merged
since the last issue and looked at all the reddit posts, discourse
threads, etc.

A list-of-links like TWiR has become (due to sheer volume of stuff)
isn't very valuable on its own. One or two sentence summaries of
important work can give casual readers/non-devs insight into the
goings on in a way that clicking random links doesn't.

Hope these comments are useful :)

-- 
cmr
http://octayn.net/
+16038524272