Getting and keeping content managers/writers

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

Ever since I subscribed and became a lurker on Cheek's maillist, I
realized that we need a reason for people to be content managers and
writers.  Playing on the idealistic nature of people wanting to help an OS
documentation project isn't enough if we want to be *big*.

1)  You need people to be passionate about this.  I don't know how many of
you read the linux-kernel list, but the people on it are passionate about
Linux and their code.  It's actually quite competitive.  There's a good
article on Linux World about competition & Linux:

http://linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-vcontrol_4.html

I don't know how to get this, but I know one thing.  For people to
become and keep passionate about something, they need to keep
communicating with others who feel the same way.  This list and our
occasional IRC chats are nice, but as our group grows we're going to have
to rethink this some.  One idea is a some more maillists:

linuxkb-announce  - low volume announce only
linuxkb-devel     - this current list, for developers/coders
linuxkb           - discussions, comments, questions about the site etc.
                  Targeted at content maintainers, article writers, etc.

2)  We need to give something back to these people- something they can put
on their resume or something.  Something simple would be a credits page
where we list each contributor of content and the number of articles
they've contributed.  Maybe for each Category, we list the maintainer with
the category, kinda like www.about.com.

Do we want to give them web page space or an email account?  What are the
requirements for an account?  Are there any Linux related companies that
might be willing to provide incentives?  Write 100 articles and get your
choice of CDROM or something.  (This is just a brain dump, I'm not saying
this is good or anything. :-)

Cheek is giving his developers a cut of the banner ad revenue.  A flawed
model IMHO, but still interesting.

Anyways, I'm sure everyone else here has ideas and I'd love to hear them.
Roger, I know you've been a part of many projects- what made the sucessful
ones sucessful and the failed ones, um, not so sucessful?

Well, time to kick out and enjoy the night-life of downtown...

Later,
Aaron