Proposal to move Community Blog to Fedora Discussion

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

@ngompa

I don’t think we want the press watching discussion so closely. It will create feedback amplification issues that we are already trying to avoid.

To be honest, I don’t know why the community blog posts aren’t part of the Magazine?

The audience for the Community Blog is an internal contributor audience instead of an external user audience. The Fedora Magazine audience is a wider, more public view of the Fedora Project, whereas the Community Blog is meant to be a more internal-facing collection of topics that is relevant for contributors to the community. Occasionally, we echo things out on the Fedora Magazine with a contributor bend (e.g. Flock announcements, calls for wider feedback on distro changes), but this is more the exception than the norm.

@theprogram

I will take that as a fantastic suggestion to make one bigger Magazine publication where technology and community come together.

@bookwar

Community Blog supposed to be a low-bar activity, which you can do in a fast and easy way while working on something in Fedora. Fedora Magazine is supposed to look and feel much more polished.

I am looking at this wearing my previous hats as editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine and the Community Blog. When we established the Community Blog as a CommOps project back in 2015, it was to fill a gap that the Fedora Magazine was not filling. While it seems nice to have a fusion of user/tech and community-focused content, there are large segments of our community that prefer to dial in to one or the other type of feed. The Community Blog did an excellent job of that for a long time, but the amount of maintenance to keep it up became a challenge over time.

As I scroll through this discussion, I am finding that @bookwar already said all the points I wanted to say.

@bookwar

And, also, if we are talking about hosting on a same platform, Wordpress is probably not the best choice for the long term solution here.

@zlopez

Thanks for opening this up again, I can help with it, but I don’t have enough time to be responsible for it.

This is my concern, and also, @zlopez has more or less been running the Community Blog as a one-person show. And we need to fix this! Or else we are going to end up with neither a Fedora Discussion workflow or a Community Blog.

@bookwar

And from this perspective I do see Community Blog closer to Discourse than to a Magazine.

I see this as the largest benefit of moving to Discourse from a WordPress-based workflow. The amount of literal work required to get something out on Discourse is way easier than WordPress. I am here among you all as one of the largest Discourse skeptics ever, but what we have today is not working and not scaling either. For a long time now, the Community Blog has been a “hot potato” of responsibility passing between contributors until they become too burnt out to do it anymore. I’m saying this as one of the original few who launched the CommBlog over a decade ago, so this is coming with a lot of lived experience in trying to keep it afloat.

Also, another point that hasn’t come up yet, nobody except @ryanlerch knows how to update the Community Blog theme. We don’t have a lot of PHP hackers in our community either, and the Discourse support staff are honestly incredible at how much time and attention they make to improve the user experience of Discourse for Fedora.

@theprogram

I’m not sure on this point. Human interest is very ‘sellable’ to the masses. It might not be what gets the engineers going - but it may well be that new users like to see and hear from the people that make Fedora. It’s a bit of a black box knowing for sure either way.

The solution is not having one single publication to rule them all, but rather, working to pull out the interesting stories and news from contributors that are also interesting to users. These content types can overlap but they often do not.