Dear Planet Fedora

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Wed Sep 24 11:56:59 UTC 2008


A touch of historical background here:

The original goal of planet gnome (the original planet) was to give a
glimpse into the personal lives of the developers, primarily for the
benefit of other developers. The goal was to know other people, warts
and all. The goal was not 'be a gnome news feed'; there were other
places for that. From that perspective, the political posts indicate a
success, rather than a failure- we know and understand each other
better after them (even if we may disagree.) Your email, inode0,
suggests you think of it as a news feed which should be free of
'distractions' like politics, and that has never been the historical
conception of the planets.

That said, it is entirely possible that the planets have outgrown that
function- they all have lots more readers now, and often serve as a
very public face of the project. They certainly seem to have lots of
readers who clearly don't understand the history or goals behind them,
and while some occasional education might fix it, it may alternately
be an insoluble problem.

So it might be appropriate to do as mozilla (apparently?) does and
subscribe only specific tags to planet, so that authors have to tag a
post as 'planet' or 'mozilla' before it shows up on planet, and they
can exclude posts if they want to. I don't think there are speech
concerns that way, since people can still speak on their own blogs all
they want to- it just doesn't get associated with fedora. I personally
would ignore that feed and would want to 'rebuild' a full, unfiltered
feed, but maybe that is something the project could also consider
providing. Alternately, you could create something like the GNOME
'news' planet: http://news.gnome.org/ which aggregates from various
sub-project blogs. The reality is that no one reads that, though,
perhaps because, you know, it is boring as hell :)

Anyway... I'm not sure that this is really a problem. It might well
be, but comparing planet to Kos really isn't a constructive
comparison, and betrays some misunderstanding about what planet is
(was?) supposed to be and do.

Luis

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 7:17 AM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In recent days Planet Fedora has been littered with purely partisan
> political diatribes which project the image of Fedora as if it were an
> arm of one particular political party in North America. If I want to
> read the Daily Kos I know where to find it. If I want to read about
> Fedora activities I would rather not have to wade through and filter
> out the Daily Kos material on Planet Fedora.
>
> Regardless of the associations being projected (it would be equally
> obnoxious if the posts were of a different persuasion), they seem to
> me to be presenting an image of this project as something it isn't and
> I really don't care to be bombarded with discussions about macro
> economic blame theories or arguments about whether one candidate
> should be impeached or not on Planet Fedora.
>
> While I didn't agree with the board's actions to quash discussion of
> the GPL on the fedora mailing list I find the incongruity between that
> and Fedora's willingness to syndicate political rants on Planet Fedora
> stark.
>
> If I as a Fedora ambassador am expected to read Planet Fedora and if
> Fedora would like me to encourage other ambassadors (and others in
> general for that matter) to read Planet Fedora I would encourage you
> to consider facilitating a feed that doesn't contain political
> messages that are irrelevant to the Fedora project or at least in some
> way discourage them. These do not in any way promote Fedora and most
> likely will alienate people from the Fedora project for no good
> reason.
>
> John
>
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