[News] Getting the team started

[Giovanni Corriga]

Hi folks,

It's nice to see that you already dived into the work. Thanks!

I'm sending this as a starting point to get a working team structure.


Roll call
---------
As of this moment, there are four of us in this team:

- Giovanni Corriga
- Giovanni Giorgi
- Klaus D. Witzel
- Ron Teitelbaum

plus Ken Causey which acts as the board sponsor.


Tasks
-----
Until we get the hang of the thing, we should concentrate just on the
task of publishing The Weekly Squeak.
Later we can expand to other tasks, like managing the announcements
mailing list (soon to be announced), and pushing article to
Slashdot-like sites.


The Weekly Squeak
-----------------
While the community has welcomed the Weekly Squeak news-zine, there are
still some problems with it. I'll list them by priority:

- editor backup: at the moment, I'm the only one editing TWS, with
Giovanni Giorgi taking care of the interviews. This mean that I'm a
single point of failure _and_ a bottleneck for TWS: if I'm busy, I can't
add items to the work page. So I have to rush on Sunday afternoon to get
the new issue out.

- TWS lateness: as a result of me being alone, each TWS issue is now
published 8 days after the week it should report on (that is, the TWS
for the week from Oct 2nd to Oct 8th will be out on Oct 16). I'd like to
reduce it to 1 or 2 days at most.

- Articles and Columns: right now, TWS has just a news section. The
first interview has been published as an item in that section, but I'd
like to move it to it own section. I'd also like to add more columns:
- more indepth articles, like the one Ron posted earlier.
- more technical or historical articles
- stuff like Mantis bug count, most active SqueakPeople projects, etc.

- the mailing lists: ideally, TWS should be an universal news source for
all Squeak-related activites. This means monitoring many mailing lists,
(including Croquet's, Seaside's and the lists/discuss.sqf mailing
lists), blogs, newsgroups and websites. At the moment the only mailing
lists actively monitored are squeak-dev, smallwiki and squeakland.

- the publishing site: I don't like publishing on the Swiki too much;
I'd prefer publishing TWS somewhere else, and use the Swiki just as a
backup.


Proposed solutions
------------------
Here is a proposal which I'd like to discuss with you.
It's a work model that should solve some of the current issues.

During each week, everyone adds news items to TWS' work page
( http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5752 ). The one item posted by
Klaus is a good example.
After the week has ended, the editor will go through the items in the
work page, adding/editing/deleting as needed, then publish the new
edition as an article on SqueakPeople. If we can split the work, It
won't take much time for any of us, and so we can prepare a better and
quicker TWS.
This process should start with TWS issue #8 (October 9th-15th)

Articles and interviews will be first posted here, so that we can
discuss them and decide how and when to publish them.
We'll discuss other issues when the need arises.


Roles
-----
So, here's a list of roles which should be filled, and a proposal:

editor: Giovanni C. plus backup when needed
interviews: Giovanni G.
articles: Klaus, Ron
news items: Giovanni C., Giovanni G., Klaus, Ron.


Again, this is just a proposal. I'd like to hear your opinion on this.

	Giovanni