[sword-devel] Propaganda

[Jan Paul Schmidt]

There have been some discussion some time ago how to make Sword more
known and some people showed up with some ideas. I don't know what
happened with this and thought about how good is information spreading
about Sword and its projects itself. As I am subscribed to serveral
lists concerning Sword and related projects, something really important
seems to be missing for me: a newsletter.

A newsletter is quite different to the discussions on the mailing lists
and I think lots of people are interested in informations about Sword
but don't describe to mailing lists because of the traffic - imagine a
normal user who just uses a frontend for Sword - or unsubscribed after
some days because he did not get it and was just interested in some news
now and then.

Some example: Go to www.crosswire.org and look what to do if you want to
keep informed about Sword and related projects. Just a newsletter. Not
subscribing to several mailing lists and then coping with line noise to
humble over new releases or whatever.

There should be a newsletter which summarizes the last time and informs
the subscriber about new releases, new modules, known problems, legal
issues, how development proceeds and other statuses about the projects.

That is at least my opinion. So it should be made clear, if you think
there is a need for this. (Or if I get something wrong and there is a
wonderful newsletter about Sword hidden somewhere on www.crosswire.org)

If you are unsure and cannot imagine what I am talking about, here is
the scoop:

- Make the newsletter subscribable from the main pages of Sword and
  related projects (if possible or make a link).
- Find someone who does all the work :o)

The last can be quite time consuming, so here is a scenario how to avoid
someone getting burned out:

- Have someone of every project who makes a summary of what happened the
  last time.
- Have some kind of supervisor who collects this information and creates
  the newsletter.

The other scenario would be:

- Someone is subscribed to every mailing list and collects the
  information.
- He maybe gets additional information by other people like project
  leaders.
- This person creates the newsletter and send the newsletter to someone
  responsible of a project to check the newsletter
- If no regrets are made, let the newsletter go to public

Besides that, is should be decided how frequent the newsletter comes
out. In my opinion, bi-weekly would be nice at this time. For a weekly
newsletter the information is not enough and for a monthly newsletter
the time between two releases is too big.

At first you should decide if yes or no, ignoring the work of
organisation and if someone exists who does this. It is important at
first to see what to do and not how to do. The second step would be to
see how to do it.

Any opinions?

jps