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

[Lunar]

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.

“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

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).

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.
 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.
 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?
 7. What more do you want from Tor Weekly News?

We could do it by email (sent to tor-talk with a Reply-Tor) or through a
dedicated web application. It would be mentioned boldly in the beginning
next TWN edition.

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
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