"your fedora story" idea?

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 11:07 -0600, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> Ian Weller <ianweller at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well, based on all the other great support, I think I'm gonna go ahead
> > with this idea.  It was half baked at the time, and I think I'm gonna
> > get it out more...
> > 
> 
> Great :)

+1 to this idea overall.  For practical purposes, I work in Red Hat on a
marketing team (brand, communications, design), who have a similar
mission to tell the Fedora story.  I'll make sure to have time in my
schedule to help this start and grow.

> > I've brainstormed some names and I've written my thoughts under 'em.
> > Let me know what you guys think.
> > 
> > - Fedora Stories
> >    of course, sometimes the word 'story' means fictional story to some
> 
> This sounds good to me...

Straightforward is great, especially for this case.  If the fiction
sounds wrong, we could play off the old serial magazines of the 1950s:
"Fedora True Stories."

Designers -- salivating yet?

> > and so on.  I'm thinking it would be a good idea to get a subdomain off
> > fedoraproject.org with our name -- i.e., stories.fedoraproject.org,
> > showandtell.fedoraproject.org...
> 
> I'm not sure this is necessary as it's maybe more of a project to come
> under an existing one. From the top of my head, FWN might be interested, or
> we could maybe work it in the same way that we're doing the interviews.
> 
> The advantage of going either of these two routes is that we've got
> experience with it and an existing audience.

+1

To take this further, I'm going to dangerously delve into process and
technical solutions with a little workflow, to explain why I think using
news.fp.org is a good idea.

1. Web form takes in stories; +1 to this as a way to get the individual
contribution (story) under a CLA and appropriate license.  Conceivably,
we could ask people to choose from amongst several license choices.

2. The 'story editorial board' receives the results of this web form and
decides which stories to tell.  Presuming the original license allows
derivative works, we can edit for clarity, word smith, etc.  Another
option is to have an iterative round with the original author to get all
changes approved.  In all this, try not to erase the individual
style/voice.[1]

3. We publish stories directly to news.fp.o via the blog mechanism.  Why
is a blog engine our best tool?  This is aside from Jon's notes that
using existing story channels gives us instant audience.
  a. Instant RSS feed with categories
  b. Simple publishing - team-viewable drafting, on screen review, fast
updates, works well for a small editorial/writing team
  c. News outlets traditionally tell human interest stories, so this
easily fits under the FWN banner
  d. News == truth, making it unnecessary to label our stories as
non-fiction
  e. Linking across to other blogs is easy with tracebacks
  f. Gives another reason to visit news.fp.o other than once-a-week

4. If we have a special location on e.g. fedoraproject.org to highlight
a story, we do it as an RSS feed of a specific category we use in the
blog engine.  Then an editor only has to tag a story with this category,
and it automatically appears in the queue.  That queue can rotate
serially, or rotate the latest five choices, or so forth.  AIUI, the RSS
feed code is ready, we might need to do some small tweaks for this use.

5. Red Hat Magazine will surely want to pick up some of these stories.
The blog engine helps this.  Especially having the CLA and ability to
republish from an original license.  There might be another rewrite or
reformatting at that time, because a different group of editors are
involved.  Once this relationship is started, we'll all find this very
beneficial.

> > To answer gopal's question on how one would submit their story, either a
> > web form or an email address would work.  I'd think a web form might be
> > better, because redhat legal might want all of them licensed in a
> > certain way for us to be able to use them.
> 
> To my mind, this is the most important question, and maybe you'd like to
> think about these things:
> 
>  * How are you going to find people who have a story to tell?
>  * How are they going to submit the story?
>  * What format will they be presented in?
>  * How will you let people know they exist?
> 
> Just my thoughts on the matter, might be that others disagree entirely with
> me, but I at least think this is a great starting point :)

Jon, you have hit upon the most important part of this.  We can have the
technical materials up in a few days, with all the process we need
empowering a team (three, four of us already.)  But from there, we need
other word-spreaders.  We need to get people to submit stories to us
they have read from other places; we may need to do some posts as a
rewrite of the story around another post that we link to v. publishing
it as fresh.  If we're motivated, some folks could crawl e.g.
fedoraforum.org and look for what might be an interesting story, then
post the URL to tell the story.  Hopefully we'll get an army of people
passing the URL to the web form. :)

Think of how it will be once we get the flow working:

        As seen on #fedora from quaid's Crystal Ball o' De Futah:

        someKid [foo] has joined #fedora
        < EvilBob> Hey, someKid, how did that university computer lab
        install go?
        < someKid> EvilBob:  Man, it was wicked easy.  It took me an
        hour to write up the three .ks files and other parts Cobbler
        needed, mounted an Everything install image on my install
        server, and now we are re-installing three times daily for each
        different class's needs.
        < EvilBob> someKid:  That's a great story.  Maybe you want to
        tell others about it?  http://fedoraproject.org/tell-my-story
        someKid goes to look
        < someKid>:  Cool, that was quick. I'd love everyone to hear how
        easy it is to run Fedora for programming classes ...

(Thanks to Bob Jensen for unwittingly starring in this fictional IRC
chat.)

- Karsten

[1] There is a series of adverts running in the States for an insurance
company, where they get a real person to tell a real story.  To support
that person in their story telling, a famous person is along to help
interpret.  For example, in one the woman is telling about how easy it
was to get an insurance payment after her cars were wrecked in a storm;
the celebrity with her was the person who does a huge % of the movie
adverts voiceovers, and his voiceover for her went like, "Payback - this
time, it's for real."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZJMGS7l0wT8

-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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