[TWN team] Notes from discussing TWN at the 2014 summer dev. meeting

[Karsten Loesing]

Some random feedback while going through my inbox and catching up on
things...

On 28/07/14 17:01, Lunar wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Here's some notes I wrote down while we had a session to discuss Tor
> Weekly News at the 2014 summer dev. meeting. IIRC we were five.
> 
> Tor Weekly News is now more than one year old. There's 1429 tor-news@
> subscribers as of July 1st. We can say it's a success.

Thank you!

> “I like Tor Weekly News because it tells me all about the parts of Tor I
> don't understand or I don't have time to learn about.”
>     — one busy developer
> 
> The process is relatively self-organizing currently.
> 
> Plenty of people of helped over a year, but it's mainly been harmony,
> Lunar, with Karsten or Roger doing proof-reading.
> 
> We have been bad at advertising that people don't need to write the
> stories themselves, but that can just point us at an URL.
> 
> One idea here that Lunar would like to try is to get an IRC bot which
> could add an item to the list of possible topics when told:
> 
>     !twn <url> description

Sounds like a great idea!

> One evolution we discussed is to move the freeze line a couple of hours
> later. This would mean we aim to freeze on Tuesday 19:00 UTC and to
> publish 17 hours later on Wednesday 12:00 UTC (no changes).

+1

> A technical change that seems desirable is to use the Trac wiki format,
> and transform that into HTML for the blog and mail format instead of
> targetting for the mail and having to manually transform into the blog
> format. Lunar will also look into writing the supporting scripts.
> 
> We discussed harmony's idea on organizing a survey. We came up with
> following items:
> 
>  1. We write a list of all current columns and ask readers to order them
>     by interest.

Or let readers assign points from 1 to 5.  Maybe something is equally
important to people.  Points wouldn't enforce them to prioritize one
over the other.

>  2. We write three versions of the same information (one for
>     non-technical, one for power users, one for Tor dev) and ask readers
>     which one you like the most.

I like the idea, but I'm not yet sure how to ask this question (and
phrase the samples) to make the answers useful.  My guess is that most
people will like the non-technical version best, mostly because most
people are not techies.  But does that mean that all of TWN should be
written for end users?  What about that one busy developer that is
quoted above?  Would TWN still cover topics that are mostly relevant for
developers and researchers, and if so, would they be twice as long as
before?

Random idea: take one topic for end users, one for developers, one for
researchers, one for $other_potential_twn_reader and describe them on a
higher or lower technical level than in the original TWN issue.  Then
ask people if they'd have wanted more technical details, more
non-technical explanations, or were happy with what they just read.  (To
be honest, I don't know if that would lead to better results; food for
thought.)

>  3. How long have you been reading Tor Weekly News?
>  4. Why do you read Tor Weekly News?
>  5. How often do you read Tor Weekly News?
>  6. How did learn about Tor Weekly News?

+you

>  7. What more do you want from Tor Weekly News?
> 
> We could do it by email (sent to tor-talk with a Reply-Tor)

I like that header, but I think it's non-standard. ;)

More seriously, it might be that Mailman would eat the Reply-To header.
 Something to try out (maybe on a different mailing list) before sending
the official request.

> or through a
> dedicated web application. It would be mentioned boldly in the beginning
> next TWN edition.

Dedicated web application might be better.  Easy to say, of course.

All the best,
Karsten