Howto:Maintaining the newsletter

This article is a stub. You can help the wiki by expanding it.

Background

The FlightGear newsletter is intended to be released each month - however, it is entirely based on community involvement, i.e. volunteers willing to help populate and review/proof-read the newsletter, by adding relevant developments/news to the newsletter.

The whole concept only works by having a sufficient number of monthly contributions/contributors - once people stop adding to the newsletter, we no longer have sufficient contents to actually publish a newsletter each monthack of writers..

Therefore, we encourage people to reach out to other contributors and get them involved in adding relevant developments to the newsletter, ideally in conjunction with screenshots and/or youtube videos demonstrating new developments/features.

The trick is to recognize we don't get anything done by waiting for someone else to do it. So the solution is that if you think something is important/useful etc., you go ahead and do it if you can spare the time .

It's a wiki - it makes no sense to suggest e.g. to copy devel notes to the changelog - you can go ahead and do it if you believe it ought to be done - don't suggest that someone else does it, this makes no sense in a wiki - remember all others are waiting for you to do it - because they by and large tick the same way.

If you saw value reading the newsletter in the past, it should be worth your time now

It's really up to anyone who has a vision and cares to step up, take charge and organie the effort - in whatever way he sees fit.

Point being, time spent convincing someone else to start contributing rather than waiting will (if successful) multiply, so it's worth doing that rather than doing it all myself.

However, it is important to keep in mind that contributing to the newsletter does not necessarily require people to be intimately familiar with the project, usually it will suffice to track the various FlightGear channels (FlightGear forum, devel list, commit logs etc) and look for developments that may be of interest to people not involved in these channels.

In addition, newsletters often serve as the source to help populate the changelog for each new release

Objective

This article is a stub to help document, and improve, the processes involved in creating and maintaining a working newsletter - eventually, this should contain an up-to-date list of people who are willing to volunteer helping populate/proof-read the newsletter and/or mentor new contributors using the wiki.

Volunteers

Note  We need to add a table below, so that people can volunteer to help with writiing, translating, artwork etc

Ideas

• Johan mentioned additional templates to help with this

References

References