Now that Ubuntu Weekly News is getting back on track we’ve identified some needs volunteer-wise.
Back in January I posted Looking for a quick way to help Ubuntu Weekly News? Where I expressed our need to collect news and non-planet.ubuntu.com blog links about Ubuntu from the past week. We still need these, so thanks for those who have been helping!
We also need article summary writers. We have a few loyal volunteers who put in effort every weekend to handle this but it would be great to have more volunteers to take the stress off of them.
Interested? Here’s how it works.
- Volunteers throughout the week collect links and add them to our etherpad or google doc (link on UWN wiki).
- On Saturday and Sunday we ask our volunteers in #ubuntu-news to begin writing summaries in the Google doc (we have tried other collaborative tools, but this has been the most reliable internationally).
Some folks have expressed concern about having to join #ubuntu-news all weekend to help out, so instead of requiring summary writers to be in channel I’m collecting a list of email addresses of folks the acting editor can email on weekends when we really need more summary writers.
Want to be on this list? Send me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com with your address and we’ll add you to the list! Have general questions about other ways you can help Ubuntu Weekly News? Let me know!
This list of email addresses will not be shared in public, but it will be shared among admins of the project who trade off release and publishing coordination each week. You can email me at any time to be removed from the reminder list.
Monday, Jul 11th, 2011 at 3:21
Why don’t you have interested parties just join the Google document directly and divvy up the work there? Is there a downside to that I’m not seeing?
Monday, Jul 11th, 2011 at 15:48
That’s pretty much how it works, but there aren’t direct notifications from the google doc for when it’s ready for people to write summaries, so they’d have to keep checking manually. I figured sending an email when it’s ready is better for everyone :)
Thursday, Jul 21st, 2011 at 15:08
This is definetly a project I have to try. I have not done any work for ubuntu community. I just hope I have what it takes to contribute.
Sunday, Aug 14th, 2011 at 11:46
I think you can get notified of changes though. I did my first summaries today and it looks like everyone was anonymous. So, I’m not sure how notifications would work with that.
But you can have notifications done via “discussions.” So maybe the discussion is “Summary time: 8/14.” Also, neat thing about discussions is you can set them to “resolved.”
I’m subscribed to the summary doc (guessing it’s the same each week) if you want to experiment and I can tell you if I received a ping.
Sunday, Aug 14th, 2011 at 11:58
Ah cool. You have to be logged in with your Google account for you to be non-Anonymous, so people who can’t or won’t use a Google account won’t be able to get notifications.
We’ll do some experiments :)