The second installment of Developer News went out on Monday, and boy was it hard work. It's great to see so much going on, but it does make preparing the summary time consuming. Thanks a lot to Stefan Lesicnik for his help in preparing this one. As well as having more to report I also broadened the intended audience this month.
For the first month the intended audience was just Ubuntu developers, so I didn't include anything from ubuntu-devel-announce, as I assumed that everyone would already have seen those announcements. The first issue was picked up by both the fridge and LWN though, so it was more widely read, and showed there was an interest in having more news for external people. Therefore I wrote this edition to include those people as well.
I'm pretty sure that there was plenty more that we could have included as well, it's just I didn't know about it, or there was nothing to link to. I think we need to do a better job as a community to communicate what we are doing. My process was simply to trawl the archives looking for announcements and discussions of things, so all anyone had to do was write one email.
Therefore I think we have two problems to solve, firstly getting everything that is going on announced in the right places, and secondly making it easier to summarise all of the activity.
I hope that the first will become more a part of our culture, and the Developer News will help by getting more exposure for those who do communicate about what they are doing.
I'm not too sure how to improve the second though. We have a defined process for submitting items for the news, but to date there have been no submissions using that process, and one submission by editing the wiki page as I was preparing the second issue. Why is this? Why have you not submitted anything? Is it that you didn't know about the process? Is it too much work? Is it that you never think to use it? That you are not sure that your item counts? That you are not sure that someone else hasn't alread submitted it?
The feedback I have got about the Developer News has been both frequent and entirely positive, so I believe it is a valuable service that should be carried on, but I fear that the current way of doing it won't really scale. I don't think it would be worth a day of my time a month to complete it.
Any suggestions for improving the situation would be appreciated.