This page explains HOWTO contribute to ProjectNews and what YOU can do to help it.
Contents
HOWTO contribute
Contributing to ProjectNews is easy but depends on your skills and the amount of time you can spare.
Send interesting news
The easiest way to help us is to inform us about interesting things happening in the Debian universe. Debian is quite a big project, and we don't have the manpower to monitor every mailing list, blog, news site for content we might want to add to our ProjectNews. So tell us, if you noticed something interesting happening. You can usually do this by sending an E-Mail to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org .
What you should send
Generally speaking: Everything which might have an noticeable impact on the Debian Project at large and its user base is special.
Some ideas:
- Discussion taking place on a mailing list, which:
- have a noticeable impact (e.g. License Discussion, scheduled transition from
contain an interesting discussion regarding Project foo to Project bar General Resolutions, etc.)
- Smaller announcements from sub projects:
- debian installer about to release beta3, testing requested
- French debconf translations reach 100%
- cdrkit capable of burning blue ray discs
- etc...
Interesting Bug Reports (ever looked at 245047?)
- You represent Debian at a conference or exhibition (with a booth, talk, workshop, etc.)
- You wrote a report after having represented Debian at a conference or exhibition
- You were interviewed about your work on Debian
- Debian related reviews / tests / articles in other media / web sites / mailing lists / blogs
- etc...
Things you don't need to report
Debian release -- we probably know it already
Of course the above list is far from being complete. We would especially like to point out, that we can't monitor other media, web sites, blogs and everything else. So it's very valuable to report anything you think fitting to the ProjectNews to our mailing lists debian-publicity@lists.debian.org .
Keep in mind, that one of the main purposes from our side, beside keeping our users informed, is to show them that
- we are a living, working community! I.e. to show that things are done, that Debian is alive!
Help by native speakers
Currently the main editor is not a native English speaker. He knows it, and you probably have noticed it, too. So one thing you can help as a native speaker is to fix his en_DE to proper English. The issues are drafted in a subversion repository. Details on how to access is using a subversion client are listed bellow in the "Becoming an editor yourself" part. But even if you are unfamiliar with that, you can always download the current issue, review that and mail comments to the debian-publicity mailing list. We would prefer to receive your changes as diff or wdiff, if possible: Just make a copy of the downloaded file, edit it, and send us the output of diff <oldfile> <newfile>.
Becoming an editor yourself
If you want to contribute directly and want to add small articles for the ProjectNews yourself, feel free to join the team:
You _really should_ subscribe to the debian-publicity mailing list at http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity, as all discussion is held there.
You _may_ also want to subscrite to the publicity-commits mailing list at http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/publicity-commits. Everytime a change is committed to our subversion repository a mail is sent to that list. So it's very easy to stay up to date.
- If you are already an Debian Developer you should already have write access to the subversion repository.
- If you are not a Debian Developer, you need an account on Alioth.
If you already have one, you can just request to join the publicity project.
If you don't have one, please register on Alioth and then request to join the publicity project.
At this point, you really should read our Guidelines for ProjectNews articles.
Accesing the subversion repository
Before accessing the subversion repository, you might want to read ?Setting up SSH the first time to use the subversion repository on alioth more conveniently.