[discussion] archiving and retiring the Dot

[Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss]

Thank you @Johnny and @Kenny for the input, very helpful!

@Johnny see below for comments relevant also for your email.

tl;dr I have added some additional ideas to consider.

On 10/2/23 14:58, Kenny Duffus wrote:
> On Monday, 2 October 2023 12:28:25 BST Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> at the recent Promo Sprint we addressed the topic of Promo blogging and
>> the Dot. The topic was brought up in the context of other discussions
>> about blogging at KDE (see [1]). One observation was that the
>> communication needs the Dot addresses are being fulfilled elsewhere. For
>> instance:
>>
>>    * Software releases are posted to the announcements page:
>> https://kde.org/announcements/
>>
>>    * e.V. news is posted at the e.V. page: https://ev.kde.org/news/
> 
> I am unlikely to be the only one that doesn't regularly check those places
> 

I would assume you are not the only one. Note, currently posts at the 
above sites are not on the Dot, but on Planet.

>>    * Many teams have their own blogs (https://eco.kde.org/blog/,
>> https://gcompris.net/news-en.html, etc.)
>>
>>    * Akademy updates are posted at the Akademy page: https://akademy.kde.org/
>>
> 
> That is not correct, Akademy makes a huge use of the dot for sharing info to the wider community
> 
> You can see this by looking at the articles on https://dot.kde.org/
> 

Yes, true, and originally I had noted that we could consider adding a 
blog functionality to the Akademy site, but for some reason I removed it 
from the final draft.

I'll add: Johnny pointed out in another email that SoK/GSoK both make 
heavy use of the Dot as well.

>> Posts to the above blogs also appear on Planet KDE. Moreover, Promo
>> announces all news related to the above topics on social media as well.
>>
>> In this context, a radical idea came up: perhaps we can archive and
>> retire the Dot altogether.
>>
>> What does the commmunity think about this proposal?
>>
>> Archiving and retiring the Dot will solve the problem of migrating it,
>> as it does not get migrated at all, just archived. It helps followers of
>> KDE news discriminate more easily between what they want to read about
>> and what not. And for followers who want to read everything there's
>> always the Planet.
>>
>> Additionally, retiring the Dot would help streamline our communication
>> and the work that goes into maintaining it, also in terms of
>> infrastructure. Any blog posts outside of the above topics but related
>> to Promo could be published on the personal sites of the Promo team
>> (perhaps hosted at the revised blogs.kde.org site [1]) and aggregated on
>> Planet.
>>
>> What does the community think of this idea? Do you support it? Oppose it?
> 
> I think its a terrible idea
> 
> KDE needs somewhere for official news, having that just mixed in with blog posts would make them much harder to find and be drowned out in noise
> 

I see the case for having a dedicated official KDE news channel. And 
yes, the high number of posts on Planet may make it hard to find 
official news in the stream of contributor blog posts. That said, e.V. 
and software release news do not appear on the Dot, which are also 
official news.

So in its current form the Dot seems to be needed for SoK/GSoC, Akademy 
as well as those posts which do not have a dedicated blog where they can 
be published (e.g., the wallpaper contest, 25 years of KDE Free Qt 
Foundation).

Some alternative ideas to put out there, perhaps worth considering:

  * Option 1: have dedicated blogs for Akademy (e.g., 
akademy.kde.org/blog/), outreach programs in KDE (e.g., 
season.kde.org/blog/ for SoK), etc., aggregated on Planet.

  * Option 2: Akademy, SoK/GSoC, etc. posts could be published on the 
revised blogs.kde.org [1] under an individual account (e.g., 
blogs.kde.org/jazeix/) or a team account (if that is possible, e.g., 
blogs.kde.org/akademy/), aggregated on Planet. This would not require 
any additional infrastructure support.

The above ideas still do not solve the issue of having one site for 
official KDE news, so:

  * The Dot (perhaps renamed to something like kde.org/news/ for 
transparency) could be an aggregator dedicated to the above news blogs 
(e.V., software release announcements, Akademy, SoK/GSoC, etc.), and not 
a blog hosting service.

  * Maybe a filtering function could be added to the Planet? 
(Admittedly, I don't know if that is difficult to implement.) This way, 
all KDE blog posts appear in one place, but readers can filter out posts 
tagged with "news" or something similar.

Cheers,
Joseph

[1] Note: Background info regarding the proposal for a new blogs.kde.org:

 > To replace blogs.kde.org we start a blog hosting service that is open 
to everyone with a dev account or e.v. membership. This new service will 
not have a global main page but only individual ones. e.g. 
blogs.kde.org/sitter/ might be my blog.

From: https://discuss.kde.org/t/a-new-blogs-kde-org/5011

-- 
Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
KDE Internal Communications & KDE Eco Community Manager
OpenPGP: 8FC5 4178 DC44 AD55 08E7 DF57 453E 5746 59A6 C06F
Matrix: @joseph:kde.org

Generally available Monday-Thursday from 10-16h CET/CEST. Outside of 
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