Re: Getting and keeping content managers/writers

[Jason Pincin <jpincin@ashtech.net>]

I've put a lot of thought into what Aaron has brought up here... and much of it has
been in the DataBase since the beginning.  You'll notice a UserArticleXref table.
That table was put in place from the beginning to give credit to article
contributers.  I always planned on using the competitive nature in people to better
all things.  I've already put thought into the credits page... got some great ideas
for that.

Mailing lists... yeh... the standard announce, devel, and linuxkb will be fine... I
was planning on setting that up and moving the mailing list to one of our boxes.

The things aaron brings up that I haven't given thought to are email accounts, free
giveaways, etc.  They are all extremely interesting.  But With what we have in
place (what I descrivbed above) I believe we'll garner enough of an initial
fascination... then we can begin to think about the other things.  We'll start to
see just how much of a base we establish for article creation, etc. which could
influence our decision on some of the things Aaron points out.

Jason



On Sat, Jun 26, 1999 at 07:37:52PM -0700, Aaron Turner wrote:
> 
> 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