"your fedora story" idea?

[Ian Weller]

And now to make this email even longer. ;)

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 11:07 -0600, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
>> Ian Weller <ianweller at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Well, based on all the other great support, I think I'm gonna go ahead
>>> with this idea.  It was half baked at the time, and I think I'm gonna
>>> get it out more...
>>>
>>
>> Great :)
>
> +1 to this idea overall.  For practical purposes, I work in Red Hat on a
> marketing team (brand, communications, design), who have a similar
> mission to tell the Fedora story.  I'll make sure to have time in my
> schedule to help this start and grow.

Cool!
>
>>> and so on.  I'm thinking it would be a good idea to get a subdomain off
>>> fedoraproject.org with our name -- i.e., stories.fedoraproject.org,
>>> showandtell.fedoraproject.org...
>>
>> I'm not sure this is necessary as it's maybe more of a project to come
>> under an existing one. From the top of my head, FWN might be interested, or
>> we could maybe work it in the same way that we're doing the interviews.
>>
>> The advantage of going either of these two routes is that we've got
>> experience with it and an existing audience.
>
> +1
>
> To take this further, I'm going to dangerously delve into process and
> technical solutions with a little workflow, to explain why I think using
> news.fp.org is a good idea.
>
> 1. Web form takes in stories; +1 to this as a way to get the individual
> contribution (story) under a CLA and appropriate license.  Conceivably,
> we could ask people to choose from amongst several license choices.
I was just thinking one license to keep it simple and not scare people
away.  I've seen where license picking, if *necessary*, has sorta
confused people.  CC-BY-SA should work just fine IMHO, or Legal could pick
a license.
>
> 2. The 'story editorial board' receives the results of this web form and
> decides which stories to tell.  Presuming the original license allows
> derivative works, we can edit for clarity, word smith, etc.  Another
> option is to have an iterative round with the original author to get all
> changes approved.  In all this, try not to erase the individual
> style/voice.[1]

Once again on the pull quote thing... I think it's really important we
pull the strongest quote from each story and put it in a rotator on the
fp.o front page.
>
> 3. We publish stories directly to news.fp.o via the blog mechanism.  Why
> is a blog engine our best tool?  This is aside from Jon's notes that
> using existing story channels gives us instant audience.
>  a. Instant RSS feed with categories
>  b. Simple publishing - team-viewable drafting, on screen review, fast
> updates, works well for a small editorial/writing team
>  c. News outlets traditionally tell human interest stories, so this
> easily fits under the FWN banner
>  d. News == truth, making it unnecessary to label our stories as
> non-fiction
>  e. Linking across to other blogs is easy with tracebacks
>  f. Gives another reason to visit news.fp.o other than once-a-week

+1
>
> 4. If we have a special location on e.g. fedoraproject.org to highlight
> a story, we do it as an RSS feed of a specific category we use in the
> blog engine.  Then an editor only has to tag a story with this category,
> and it automatically appears in the queue.  That queue can rotate
> serially, or rotate the latest five choices, or so forth.  AIUI, the RSS
> feed code is ready, we might need to do some small tweaks for this use.

+1
>
> 5. Red Hat Magazine will surely want to pick up some of these stories.
> The blog engine helps this.  Especially having the CLA and ability to
> republish from an original license.  There might be another rewrite or
> reformatting at that time, because a different group of editors are
> involved.  Once this relationship is started, we'll all find this very
> beneficial.
>
>>> To answer gopal's question on how one would submit their story, either a
>>> web form or an email address would work.  I'd think a web form might be
>>> better, because redhat legal might want all of them licensed in a
>>> certain way for us to be able to use them.
>>
>> To my mind, this is the most important question, and maybe you'd like to
>> think about these things:
>>
>>  * How are you going to find people who have a story to tell?
>>  * How are they going to submit the story?
>>  * What format will they be presented in?
>>  * How will you let people know they exist?
>>
>> Just my thoughts on the matter, might be that others disagree entirely with
>> me, but I at least think this is a great starting point :)
>
> Jon, you have hit upon the most important part of this.  We can have the
> technical materials up in a few days, with all the process we need
> empowering a team (three, four of us already.)  But from there, we need
> other word-spreaders.  We need to get people to submit stories to us
> they have read from other places; we may need to do some posts as a
> rewrite of the story around another post that we link to v. publishing
> it as fresh.  If we're motivated, some folks could crawl e.g.
> fedoraforum.org and look for what might be an interesting story, then
> post the URL to tell the story.  Hopefully we'll get an army of people
> passing the URL to the web form. :)

If we could get whoever runs fedoraforum.org to put a link in their
header, that would be neat.
>
> Think of how it will be once we get the flow working:
>
>        As seen on #fedora from quaid's Crystal Ball o' De Futah:
>
>        someKid [foo] has joined #fedora
>        < EvilBob> Hey, someKid, how did that university computer lab
>        install go?
>        < someKid> EvilBob:  Man, it was wicked easy.  It took me an
>        hour to write up the three .ks files and other parts Cobbler
>        needed, mounted an Everything install image on my install
>        server, and now we are re-installing three times daily for each
>        different class's needs.
>        < EvilBob> someKid:  That's a great story.  Maybe you want to
>        tell others about it?  http://fedoraproject.org/tell-my-story
>        someKid goes to look
>        < someKid>:  Cool, that was quick. I'd love everyone to hear how
>        easy it is to run Fedora for programming classes ...
>
> (Thanks to Bob Jensen for unwittingly starring in this fictional IRC
> chat.)

+1 ;)
>
> - Karsten
>
> [1] There is a series of adverts running in the States for an insurance
> company, where they get a real person to tell a real story.  To support
> that person in their story telling, a famous person is along to help
> interpret.  For example, in one the woman is telling about how easy it
> was to get an insurance payment after her cars were wrecked in a storm;
> the celebrity with her was the person who does a huge % of the movie
> adverts voiceovers, and his voiceover for her went like, "Payback - this
> time, it's for real."
>
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZJMGS7l0wT8
Ha, I love these.... good example.