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Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 10:52:22 -0400
From: "Ted Husted" <husted@apache.org>
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To: community@apache.org
Subject: Grassroots PR
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(Note that a draft of this message was posted to PRC@ before posting here.)

In recent threads on the PRC list, a couple of items came up that
might be worth bringing to the community for further discussion. These
suggestion all require community participation, and so a key question
is whether the community would participate :)

 * Extending people.apache.org with personal profiles
 * press@project and security@project email drops
 * A Roller zone for PMC blogs


Extending people.apache.org with personal profiles

It's been suggested that we circulate a press release regarding the
election of the 2007-2008 board, and include some headshots and bios
of present and past officers and board members on our board page.
We've started to collect more information about the people involved in
the foundation at <http://people.apache.org>, but the site is not well
publicized. If we would like to post profiles of our board members,
perhaps we would also like work toward providing personal profiles for
all of our committers. If we added personal profiles to the
people.apache.org site, and added the capability to create a page per
ASF project or group, we might end up with "Who we are" pages for each
project that looked something like the profile page here:
<http://women.debian.org/profiles/>. For discussion purposes, I've
posted an example of an ASF personal profile at
<http://people.apache.org/~husted/profile.html>, cribbing from the
Debian site. Again, the format is for discussion purposes only.

Should we encourage a more personal touch to our "who we are" pages?


press@project and security@project email drops

A recurring PR problem is finding someone with product knowledge to
contact that's willing to respond. Perhaps we should encourage all
projects to setup individual press@ and security@ mail drops that
could go to people within the project, who could then forward valid
messages to private@. Of course, it makes no sense to setup a project
press@ drop unless there are volunteers in the project willing to do
the work. If a project were up to handle its own press@, we could also
copy press@apache.org, so that there is some central oversight.

Should we encourage per-project press@ and project@ mail drops?


A Roller zone for PMC blogs

One of the most popular blogging softwares on the planet, Roller, is
now an ASF project <http://rollerweblogger.org/project/>. Perhaps it's
time to eat our own dogfood and encourage development of a Roller zone
where our PMC's can post easy-to-aggregate announcement blogs. These
would not be individual blogs as we have on PlanetApache.org, but PMC
blogs that would focus solely on project news. The initiative could be
tied to <http://projects.apache.org/>, so that there was a one-stop
shop for project news. Aside from Roller, another way to go would be
an XML-based feed, like the one that's being used at Jakarta. As
always, the tipping point would be whether we have volunteers up to
doing the work.

Should we encourage projects blogs to post and aggregate project news
and events?


If the community is interested in doing more to publicize the
foundation's activities, I'm sure there are other things we could do
as well. Of course, a key question is whether we want to raise our our
profile or just be the quiet juggernaut.

-Ted.

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