Best way to announce things?

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 12:28 +0000, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> > I think we should use news.fp.o extensively and integrate it into the
> >  front page via a RSS feed. Other major announcements can go to
> >  fedora-announce list. Things like publican for example. We should
> >  probably drop mails to journalists directly which we have not been doing
> >  yet.
> 
> I was wondering more about the format they should take rather than
> where - though I totally agree with your comments here :)
> 
> I'm not sure what other formats we could consider to a press release
> tbh, but I just wanted to make sure we were using the best methods at
> our disposal...

You are asking about format, which means:

* Style of writing
* Tooling (file format)

For the style of writing, I agree with Rahul's suggestion of a casual
tone.  We seem to be going down that direction quite well.

For tooling, we have a very cool and very simple to use method for
writing 'press releases' that can be translated.  Getting global
coverage is going to require translation, at a minimum.  Some
announcements might need to be rewritten from scratch in other languages
because of idioms, etc.

Anyone feel like learning to use this press release tool, then writing
up how-to on the wiki?

If you don't have a CVS account you can use anonymous access:

export CVS_RSH=ssh 
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous at cvs.fedoraproject.org:/cvs/docs
cvs -z3 login
cvs -z3 co press-release docs-common

Actually, you might not need docs-common, I disrecall.  It uses it's own
custom DTD, so it has a very small set of tags.  It is mainly plain text
that can easily be pulled in for translation. :)

The point would be to follow a rough process like this:

1. Collaborate on a list of what to highlight (ongoing)
2. Collaborate via the wiki to write up draft => ready to release
3. Copy and paste into a press-release shell
4. Finish conversion into press-release and keep these in a version
control system

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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