Talk:FlightGear Newsletter October 2009

Newsletter Template and Structure

There should really be one generic newsletter template, providing a certain structure for all upcoming newsletters, possibly including a section about unfinished work that is "work in progress", this would provide a way for contributors to more easily document work that is going on "behind the scenes" (without it having to be finished) and that may not be as obvious as some of the more prominent examples such as eye candy/effects.

Similarly, documenting the most recent/important CVS commits seems like a good way to populate the newsletter with interesting contents (see [1]).

Also, there should probably be some guidelines about contributing to the newsletter, i.e. discouraging the use of the first person perspective.

In addition, the newsletter could be made more interesting by nominating "aircraft of the month" and "airport of the month", both of which would also provide a way for such contributions to get some attention and thus create some more gratification among contributors. The corresponding polls could be conducted on the FlightGear forums.

Furthermore, there was a discussion on the FG forums some time ago about focusing developer efforts on existing aircraft [2], in order to encourage newcomers to help improve existing aircraft instead of starting yet another incomplete aircraft. Such an effort could also be communicated using the newsletter and the forums (i.e. "11/2009:Improving the C172p".

• Aircraft of the Month
• Airport of the Month
• Suggested Flight of the Month (based on Suggested Aircraft and Suggested Airports or Challenging Airports)

• New in CVS

• There could also be a column about Nasal scripting in FlightGear (could be mostly based on copied/pasted snippets from the Nasal article]]

• Finished Projects
  • Aircraft
  • Scenery
  • Tools

• Work in Progress
  • Aircraft
  • Scenery (based on Current Scenery Projects)
  • Tools

• Community News (forums, mailing lists)
  • Help Requests (i.e. wiki translation efforts)

• Upcoming Events (real and online)
  • Exhibtions
  • Multiplayer

• This link is not working:
  • Euroair is the new name for Aurélen European airlines ... http://euroair.ning.com/ (Oops! That page doesn’t exist.)