News submission feature

[starbelly]

In order to support the community better we need a place on the site where the community can submit news.

• Login is required to create a submission.
• Submissions go into a queue for moderation.

There may be different classes of submissions:

• link backs
• content
• events

Content is to be in markdown form and the current "standard" markdown editor is to be available in the form.

The form should capture the 4 Ws (Who, What, Why, Where) and How. The fields don't have to be named such, but should the form should capture all of these points.

Submissions will be made available in table form. We surely need at least a few mutable fields, such as :

• priority
• labels / flags

The fields above are not required for an MVP. Rather, the 4 Ws and How is the bare minimum.

The marketing team will be responsible for publishing the content through various mediums.

It may be we want some submissions to simply be approved and when approved made available automagically, but that is not clear yet. It is assumed to start with that each submission will manually be dealt with (i.e., a blog post is created from the content manually, an event is added manually). Thus, entries in the hopper at the very least need to be marked as processed

Initial idea for schema:

  :type, :string, null: false
  :status, :string, null: false
  :who, :text, null: false
  :what, :text, null: false
  :when, :text, null: false
  :why, :text, null: false
  :how, :text, null: false
  :additional_info, :text
  :links, :text
  :suggested_mediums, :map
  :supporting_documents, :map
  :operator_notes, :map
  :flags, :map
  :priority, :integer
  :submitted_by_id, references(:members, on_delete: :nothing)
  :updated_by_id, references(:members, on_delete: :nothing)
  :processed_by, references(:members, on_delete: :nothing)
  :inserted_at, :utc_datetime
  :updated_at, :utc_datetime 

[starbelly]

What fields should we make available in the form? What is fields are required? Which are optional?

[benoitc]

do we need a form ? Even the bbc is simply using mail and twitter :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/questions/getting-in-touch/send-a-story

[starbelly]

@benoitc On the call, everyone thought that was a good stop gap solution, but if we re-prioritized, we could do via a web form. I thought we were all on the same page, but there was a misunderstanding. I'm not opposed to an email solution, but I do think that information must go into something more manageable.

EDIT:

A few points :

• I think it's good for us to have an inbox for this, but this doesn't obviate the need for system for it to go into.
• We need said system so we can provide an interface for administrators, marketing, and the board so that it's clear the following is clear to all:
  1. What came in?
  2. How is it/was it flagged?
  3. What was processed?
  4. What wasn't processed and why?
• We may also want some items to simply be approved to go on the site, vs manually creating blog posts and so forth, creating tweets, etc. we can't do that with email.

Likewise, such a system provides the foundation for other tools to feed into it (such as as an aggregator).

[starbelly]

I think in retrospect we should start off with news submissions limited to members. I think we can have an inbox where anonymous submissions go.

EDIT:

To be clear, I don't think we should start off with anonymous submissions. I think even restricting it to members only to start with we'll have plenty to process. I'd rather not start off with people sifting through spam on day one :p

[starbelly]

Note: It's not clear yet whether this will replace the existing events submission form or whether they will compliment each other.

[peerst]

Agree with all you wrote above @starbelly

[benoitc]

I think in retrospect we should start off with news submissions limited to members. I think we can have an inbox where anonymous submissions go.

EDIT:

To be clear, I don't think we should start off with anonymous submissions. I think even restricting it to members only to start with we'll have plenty to process. I'd rather not start off with people sifting through spam on day one :p

i don’t see why we should change the plan that have been already discussed. Allowing non members to post a news allows conference related and other members of the whole ecosystem to post. I don’t think we will be overwhelmed by the number of submissions to worry about any inconvenience. And again we already discussed about it.

Using email allows us to go faster to show this feature also. we would have anti spam for free. We were agree to have both anyway. We can already provide today a link to a mail.

[starbelly]

I think we weren't sure on what we agreed about. Email or something ad-hoc way was originally suggested and sounded ideal if we wanted to get it done that day. However, later in the discussion we agreed (or so I thought) that we need a more systematic way of ingesting suggestions, we simply needed to re-prioritize, which we've done and to which there has been no majority objection.

As far as some details changing, this is normal to me. A handful of people get on a meeting and things are discussed but it takes a minute to digest and reflect. It always feels a bit manic and chaotic to me personally (no matter the context or with whom). A lot of things sound great in the moment, but then you think... It's quite normal after said digestion and reflection to say "No, that doesn't make sense" or "I didn't think about these pitfalls", etc. I wouldn't want it any other way really.

I'm not opposed to email long term, but I don't feel it makes sense right now. Especially because we have no abuse policy in place. I'd also rather empower the community to say what they mean on the front and not leave it to be parsed and subject to interpretation. Or the opposite, not providing enough information on the front because there's no form that constrains the inputs (required and optional).

In addition, whatever "jobs" we put in place so to speak must be easy, it can't be any other way IMO.

Also keep in mind, the hopper is not just about submitting, it's about all the points made above in regards to flags, priority, and accounting.

[benoitc]

We agreed on 2 things:

1. The feature should let people external to the foundation (none members) to post news relatives to the ecosystem. So a company employee or a sponsor could also provides some news.
2. We would allow email and a form

As far as I know we already have all the necessaries to handle a mail now... It is not that different from our contact mail.

I would suggest the following:

1. On the website, have a news@ mail that will allows us to sort mail and distinct them from general contact mails. That will ease their management. This mail would be made public on he news page
2. On each WG pages / Members pages add a way to publish a news.

IMO that will address all the concerns. thoughts?

[starbelly]

I'm not against email so long as it's an inbox and it's someone's job to sift through it and put into the system that I'm developing now. We should have an abuse policy in place though. So, IMO unless there's objections from others, you have my support.

• On the website, have a news@ mail that will allows us to sort mail and distinct them from general contact mails. That will ease their management. This mail would be made public on he news page

I assume the last part means mail will be processed, put into system, then processed and published (if deemed news worthy)

• On each WG pages / Members pages add a way to publish a news.

There is already a ticket for working groups which will just allow them to add blog posts, not sure about members here, that sounds like another issue, unless you just mean a link to the form or email.

Anyway, if others do not have objections, then we can make a news@ (tamper proof) and once again someone will have to have the responsibility of going through it and putting it into the system. If we agree on that, I'm fine with it.

[benoitc]

do we need an « abuse » policy? We are between pro somehow, so a simple paragraph should enough?

[starbelly]

@benoitc That should suffice, and perhaps an auto-reply to the sender maybe.

[starbelly]

FWIW and to keep this issue current the marcom team is accepting emails for news suggestions atm, but nothing has come into their inbox yet.

We haven't marketed the news tip feature yet, we can start to do that now I think, but to note, while we haven't marketed it, it is on the site and no one has submitted one yet.

I think we're going to find that the amount of news tips will be very small, at least for now. It might suggest we're putting too much effort into this, but without some more marketing I'm not sure.