Opening Red Hat Magazine

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 6:29 AM, Max Spevack <mspevack at redhat.com> wrote:
> I think we should try to get the current RHM editorial team into a Fedora
> Marketing meeting to chat about these sorts of topics.

Trademark and branding concerns may make the need for such a
conversation a non-starter.

But in the context of Greg's original question, I think you are right.
If we are going to produce Fedora content using the RHM voice, we'd
need to have a reasonably good understanding as to what has been
successful strategies for cultivating RHM content, and what strategies
haven't worked.  I'm concerned that the underlying problem for us
isn't the infrastructure but we haven't yet hit on a volunteer
sustainable process by which we cultivate content.

If all we wanted was to fill space with opinion-mongering. I'm your
man. I'll get off the board by the end of the calendar year and
dedicate the time I've set aside for fab email to writing poorly
punctuated editorial screeds meant for Fedora magazine content. But
you know what? I think that is exactly the sort of content you want to
avoid as much as possible.

If we want to set a higher bar than that, where we aim for some
technical meat then I'm not sure we figured out how to cultivate that
material.  For example.  a cleaned up version of Leenart's "Guide to
Sound APIs" now appearing on his blog would be something I could see
being lifted up into a magazine article. But since its already on his
blog, is it no longer worth trying to recirculate in a dedicated
magazine since the intended audience has already seen it on the
planet?

My feeling is, if we we going to do this, we need to figure out a way
to make use of gatherings of community members as significant
generators of magazine content which can be released over a period of
time. Just for example if we had a Fedora "press" person at Plumbers,
how much content could have been generated from personal conversations
via audio notes or video footage?  Can we expect a volunteer press
person to pay their own way for a technical conference like Plumbers?
Can we turn one of the attendees to a conference like that into a
Fedora press person? Put a FUDCon in Fairbanks and I'll help you
figure all that out in a controlled environment :->.

-jef