The purpose of the News team is to publish news regarding Squeak development and use. It aims to provide a service to the Squeak community, highlighting anything which the Squeak users may find interesting in The Weekly Squeak newszine. It will also try to promote Squeak outside its own community, by submitting articles and news items to mainstream websites such as Slashdot and OSNews.
The team is still only a couple of weeks old, but things seem to be improving already.
The most important open issues are: 1. editor backup: at the moment the editor (who is responsible for actually publishing the content) is a bottleneck and a single point of failure for the whole news publishing process. This means that The Weekly Squeak is always late :-( 2. publishing: publishing on the Swiki, then preparing a message to the mailing lists, then adding SqueakPeople diary entries is done by hand at the moment. Also, using the Swiki isn't the most satisfying solution. 3. mailing lists: at the moment, only the squeak-dev, smallwiki and squeakland mailing list are actively tracked.
Proposed actions, scheduled for November: 1. try and reduce TWS' lateness. This will mean taking a couple of hours for a deep immersion in squeak-dev's archives. 2. set up an experimental Smallwiki 1 server to explore possible solutions for issue #2. 3. add more mailing lists to the roster. This will mean sending a call for help and asking someone to act as a correspondent for that mailing list.
Long term actions: 1. start producing articles to be sent to mainstream news sites.
The News team has a mailing list (news@lists.squeakfoundation.org, subscribe at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news ). Everyone can subscribe to the list, even if just for lurking, but new team members are always welcome ;)
Giovanni