I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the Manifesto.
Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore about this, I said everyting above.
If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget my post.
This has been discussed before. Most contributors limit posts they syndicate to planet to be Mozilla specific, though we do allow contributors to syndicate their entire blog. Some people prefer to only see the Mozilla stuff while others like to have some insight to the people and the community behind the project. Who is right? Neither/Both.
A thought in the past was a dual-planet approach. One specific to Mozilla related stuff, and a more open one that took a broader scope of content from contributors. Then let readers choose what they want.
Of course other ideas and insights are welcome. It's a growing community. Scaling communities is no easier than scaling technology.
> I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I > guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
> I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about > Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is > about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or > whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the > Manifesto.
> Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, > or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet > (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something > unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
> As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, > blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of > information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
> This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore > about this, I said everyting above.
> If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget > my post.
It's interesting that you bring this up. Planet really is everything and there's some work going on by various parties to try and make it more useful to people based on topic and/or interest level. At the very least we should be using it to push the nicely gardened content we have - the newsletters, etc.
But it's true that planet is everything that goes on with moz people, which isn't always useful. We need better filters.
I've liked the idea of a bucketed approach, though it really doesn't translate well to feed readers without having to subscribe to several feeds. There's also the issue of duplication which is inevitable, and ultimately quite annoying.
Christopher Blizzard wrote: > It's interesting that you bring this up. Planet really is everything > and there's some work going on by various parties to try and make it > more useful to people based on topic and/or interest level. At the > very least we should be using it to push the nicely gardened content > we have - the newsletters, etc.
> But it's true that planet is everything that goes on with moz people, > which isn't always useful. We need better filters.
"Christopher Blizzard" <christopher.blizz...@gmail.com> wrote: > But it's true that planet is everything that goes on with moz people, > which isn't always useful. We need better filters.
I bet Asa disagrees with that, but I'll let him comment. :)
We've talked about this before [1] and that resulted in a bunch of changes to the way Planet Mozilla is administered [2], including guidelines for what sort of criteria must be met before people are added or removed from the resource. The main takeaway from those discussions was:
- it sure would be nice to have better ways of filtering Planet by interest and topic - fundamentally, though, Planet is about the Mozilla community, which is about more than just the development of the products
Time has marched on, though, and our community has grown significantly. Not only are there more engaged members of our community, we've expanded beyond having people who write about Mozilla- based development topics, and now include people who talk about public relations, marketing, partnerships, metrics and community governance and management. So now the Planet has grown, and we see memes (such as the current Wordle meme) run through it, we see blogstorms (such as when we launch a product) rage across it, and we see the occasional rant and the miscellaneous random. Each one of those topics, though, is written by a member of our community (our Planet, if you will) with the knowledge that it will be aggregated, seen and shared with the rest of the community. Each one contributes to the collective sense of being part of the Mozilla community, to the record of what topics are important enough to us that we wanted to publish and share our thoughts with each other and with the world.
Cedric (before passively-aggressively bowing out of the topic he
started) wrote: > If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, > forget my post.
Yes, I believe it was. Mozilla is a big Planet, and a lot of topics (and memes!) will run through it: this should, in my opinion, be expected. What better way to show the world (or show a single new contributor) the true breadth and scope of our community than to let them step into the things that people in our community want to share with each other. As Blizzard said, we should ensure there are good tools that allow people to selectively send blog entries to Planet for syndication, but we should trust that they do so for a reason, to contribute in the zeitgeist of our community, to inform and share information and identity with our colleagues and friends.
Obviously this can be a lot of information to handle - I don't think Planet is "required reading" and certainly don't think it should be relied upon as a defacto record for policy change announcements. Instead, I again agree with Blizzard, that we should have concise, topic-scoped sub blogs and newsletters to help people who want to be able to read up on the most important goings-on. We've started efforts to that end, with varying levels of success:
- announcements and major happenings of import to Mozilla hackers can reliably be found on the Mozilla Developer" News blog [3] as well as on the dev.planning newsgroup - increasingly, big new features are being profiled on the Mozilla Developer News: Web Technology blog [4] as well as the dev.platform newsgroup - add-on developers have their own newsletter and blog - the about:mozilla newsletter is a fantastic resource for the top news items over a week
For someone looking to keep abreast of the "need to know" knowledge for developing with or on Mozilla, we should keep those channels listed above focused and on-topic.
For someone looking to soak in Mozilla, we should keep Planet about our work, our lives and what's important to us as a community. Be it what our blogs look like as word clouds (or how we can create open source ways of generating those word clouds, which came out of our passion for that meme!) or the fact that a new feature was added to the Firefox Support site.
What I think we *can* do, on the other hand, is change the face of Planet. We can make it easier for people to get redirected to those topic centric blogs, and to browse through our memes. We can have a nicer skin so that people see the faces that go with the blog posts, and make our community more human. We can look into filtering tools, and perhaps even allow readers to tag and comment on posts, or add links to other relevant articles (much like Facebook allows comments on notes) as a way of semantically marking up the content so that others can filter and pull topic-centric RSS feeds off of it. As ever, patches and suggestions are welcome.
At the core, though, I don't think we should restrict the flow of information, words and collaborative spirit that makes up our community.
It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right. I'd also like to see the module owners and peers of planet think about things like splitting all the meeting notes out into a sub-planet or moon. It's a lot of scrolling to get through the meeting notes for something where I don't need the details.
> This has been discussed before. Most contributors limit posts they > syndicate to planet to be Mozilla specific, though we do allow > contributors to syndicate their entire blog. Some people prefer to only > see the Mozilla stuff while others like to have some insight to the > people and the community behind the project. Who is right? Neither/Both.
> A thought in the past was a dual-planet approach. One specific to > Mozilla related stuff, and a more open one that took a broader scope of > content from contributors. Then let readers choose what they want.
> Of course other ideas and insights are welcome. It's a growing > community. Scaling communities is no easier than scaling technology.
>> I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I >> guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
>> I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about >> Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is >> about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or >> whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the >> Manifesto.
>> Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, >> or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet >> (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something >> unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
>> As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, >> blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of >> information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
>> This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore >> about this, I said everyting above.
>> If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget >> my post.
It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right. I'd also like to see the module owners and peers of planet think about things like splitting all the meeting notes out into a sub-planet or moon. It's a lot of scrolling to get through the meeting notes for something where I don't need the details.
> This has been discussed before. Most contributors limit posts they > syndicate to planet to be Mozilla specific, though we do allow > contributors to syndicate their entire blog. Some people prefer to only > see the Mozilla stuff while others like to have some insight to the > people and the community behind the project. Who is right? Neither/Both.
> A thought in the past was a dual-planet approach. One specific to > Mozilla related stuff, and a more open one that took a broader scope of > content from contributors. Then let readers choose what they want.
> Of course other ideas and insights are welcome. It's a growing > community. Scaling communities is no easier than scaling technology.
>> I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I >> guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
>> I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about >> Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is >> about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or >> whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the >> Manifesto.
>> Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, >> or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet >> (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something >> unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
>> As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, >> blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of >> information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
>> This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore >> about this, I said everyting above.
>> If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget >> my post.
This becomes a slightly slippery slope... if we break things out enough, is it really any different than just offering a blogroll and letting readers to directly to those sites?
The dual approach where one has a strict moz/internet rule, and a "people behind the lizard" variant which is open to people's entire feeds could be a good balance since it would improve signal to noise without going to far in the other direction where planet becomes a PITA.
Perhaps another approach (or in combination with the above) is to show more headlines on the page and hide the full text at least initially by only showing say ~150px worth of content (a few lines worth). Via a few lines of JS a button can "reveal" the rest of the post should you want to read that post. This idea is similar to what Yahoo News does to story text. We could even have a way to cookie and disable that for people who don't like it. This would make it easier to scroll and browse for what your interested in. While not improving the signal:noise ratio, it would make it easier to find the signal.
My thought is to avoid building a Google Reader replica. I think that just makes planet to complicated and would reduce value. Planet's real strength is simplicity. Load the page and read. Staying as close to that as possible I think is a good strategy.
You could go the way of a Techmeme.com like layout either through automated means or with an editors help. I'm not really sure this is a solid approach. It just turns it into a news site with lots of clicking to get information. I don't think it has better readability than planet currently does. It's just more traditional.
Mitchell Baker wrote: > It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's > become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right. I'd also > like to see the module owners and peers of planet think about things > like splitting all the meeting notes out into a sub-planet or moon. > It's a lot of scrolling to get through the meeting notes for something > where I don't need the details.
> Mitchell
> Robert Accettura wrote: >> Cédric,
>> This has been discussed before. Most contributors limit posts they >> syndicate to planet to be Mozilla specific, though we do allow >> contributors to syndicate their entire blog. Some people prefer to only >> see the Mozilla stuff while others like to have some insight to the >> people and the community behind the project. Who is right? >> Neither/Both. >> A thought in the past was a dual-planet approach. One specific to >> Mozilla related stuff, and a more open one that took a broader scope of >> content from contributors. Then let readers choose what they want. >> Of course other ideas and insights are welcome. It's a growing >> community. Scaling communities is no easier than scaling technology.
>>> I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I >>> guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
>>> I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about >>> Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is >>> about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or >>> whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the >>> Manifesto.
>>> Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, >>> or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet >>> (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something >>> unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
>>> As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, >>> blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of >>> information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
>>> This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore >>> about this, I said everyting above.
>>> If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget >>> my post.
Mitchell Baker wrote: > It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's > become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right.
Dual in what sense, though? I'm a lot more interested in the non-mozilla posts of some of the project contributors (because they make it easier for me to understand where they come from and easier to work with them) than the mozilla-related posts of others (the ones who work in areas that are completely unrelated to what I work in)...
> Mitchell Baker wrote: >> It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's >> become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right.
> Dual in what sense, though? I'm a lot more interested in the non- > mozilla posts of some of the project contributors (because they make > it easier for me to understand where they come from and easier to > work with them) than the mozilla-related posts of others (the ones > who work in areas that are completely unrelated to what I work in)...
My post was too long, perhaps, to digest quickly and so I fear that a lot of people skipped it. Were I to summate, I would do so by suggesting that some simple changes to the front page of Planet might make it easier for people to pick the RSS feed they want based on the content they're looking for.
If someone just wants development news, the DevNews and WebTech blogs should be sufficient.
If someone wants community news and announcements, the about:mozilla newsletter should be sufficient.
If someone wants to know what's going on in our community, they should get all of Planet, including bits they may deem irrelevant. Posts can be easily skipped.
> I have a hard time believing I'm alone here.
You're not.
cheers, mike
(ps: one thing to note is that the meeting notes, which were recently added to Planet, aren't working out that well since they're long, often contain the same content that was copied from meeting to meeting, and the bullet form often isn't helpful. I think if we actually want to include that sort of content, we should ask meeting note-takers to create a "Summary" section in the respective wiki pages and then just import that summary - with a link to the full notes - into Planet.)
Robert Accettura wrote: > The dual approach where one has a strict moz/internet rule, and a > "people behind the lizard" variant which is open to people's entire > feeds could be a good balance since it would improve signal to noise > without going to far in the other direction where planet becomes a PITA.
I agree. A general planet with everything (like now, or even broader), and a second one that is a strict subset of the first, only reporting really Mozilla-related stuff, might be a good idea. The strict-subset rule should be so that someone readying the main planet (or its feed) should never need to look at the Mozilla-only "continent" of it. Additionally, we should keep the number of such "planets" small, two are fine, even a third or fourth might make the picture too complicated.
Mike Beltzner wrote: > If someone just wants development news, the DevNews and WebTech blogs > should be sufficient.
> If someone wants community news and announcements, the about:mozilla > newsletter should be sufficient.
> If someone wants to know what's going on in our community, they should > get all of Planet, including bits they may deem irrelevant. Posts can be > easily skipped.
Fully agreed (and for what it's worth, I had read your post, and agreed with it then too ;) ).
> If someone just wants development news, the DevNews and WebTech blogs > should be sufficient.
> If someone wants community news and announcements, the about:mozilla > newsletter should be sufficient.
> If someone wants to know what's going on in our community, they should > get all of Planet, including bits they may deem irrelevant. Posts can > be easily skipped.
There are quite a few posts that break the "news" purpose and instead propose questions and are more interactive. I think they generally share the same audience, but newsletters and those particular blogs don't really serve this purpose well. Perhaps the solution here is simply to make it easier for people to request things to be mentioned on DevNews or WebTech and link to the relevant developers blog to provide feedback.
> (ps: one thing to note is that the meeting notes, which were recently > added to Planet, aren't working out that well since they're long, > often contain the same content that was copied from meeting to > meeting, and the bullet form often isn't helpful. I think if we > actually want to include that sort of content, we should ask meeting > note-takers to create a "Summary" section in the respective wiki pages > and then just import that summary - with a link to the full notes - > into Planet.)
Agreed. Benjamin Smedberg is the one to talk to about this. IIRC he maintains that blog.
> I'm a lot more interested in the non-mozilla > posts of some of the project contributors (because they make it easier > for me to understand where they come from and easier to work with them) > than the mozilla-related posts of others (the ones who work in areas > that are completely unrelated to what I work in)...
> I have a hard time believing I'm alone here.
Definitely not alone. I tend to next/delete pretty much every post related to marketing, metrics, PR, support (ironic, I know, because I first got involved writing end-user help documentation), to name some areas I see from skimming recently-read posts in Reader, because they only affect me indirectly. I have too much of the economist/scientist in me to bring myself to care about many of these areas.
(I have a bit more to say about planet-overloading, but I think I'll relegate them to a response somewhere else since it's reasonably likely to kick-start an entirely new thread of conversation.)
Clever JS doesn't help people like me who are reading stuff in a newsreader (IE Thunderbird, Firefox LiveBookmarks, w/e) though...
I suppose I already get a list of only topics, and possibly I am the only one who is already overwhelmed by that alone, and regularly just marks stuff as read without really looking at it. Perhaps not. :-)
Robert Accettura wrote: > This becomes a slightly slippery slope... if we break things out enough, > is it really any different than just offering a blogroll and letting > readers to directly to those sites?
> The dual approach where one has a strict moz/internet rule, and a > "people behind the lizard" variant which is open to people's entire > feeds could be a good balance since it would improve signal to noise > without going to far in the other direction where planet becomes a PITA.
> Perhaps another approach (or in combination with the above) is to show > more headlines on the page and hide the full text at least initially by > only showing say ~150px worth of content (a few lines worth). Via a few > lines of JS a button can "reveal" the rest of the post should you want > to read that post. This idea is similar to what Yahoo News does to > story text. We could even have a way to cookie and disable that for > people who don't like it. This would make it easier to scroll and > browse for what your interested in. While not improving the > signal:noise ratio, it would make it easier to find the signal.
> My thought is to avoid building a Google Reader replica. I think that > just makes planet to complicated and would reduce value. Planet's real > strength is simplicity. Load the page and read. Staying as close to > that as possible I think is a good strategy.
> You could go the way of a Techmeme.com like layout either through > automated means or with an editors help. I'm not really sure this is a > solid approach. It just turns it into a news site with lots of clicking > to get information. I don't think it has better readability than planet > currently does. It's just more traditional.
> Mitchell Baker wrote: >> It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's >> become overwhelming. The dual planet idea might be right. I'd also >> like to see the module owners and peers of planet think about things >> like splitting all the meeting notes out into a sub-planet or moon. >> It's a lot of scrolling to get through the meeting notes for something >> where I don't need the details.
>> Mitchell
>> Robert Accettura wrote: >>> Cédric,
>>> This has been discussed before. Most contributors limit posts they >>> syndicate to planet to be Mozilla specific, though we do allow >>> contributors to syndicate their entire blog. Some people prefer to only >>> see the Mozilla stuff while others like to have some insight to the >>> people and the community behind the project. Who is right? >>> Neither/Both. >>> A thought in the past was a dual-planet approach. One specific to >>> Mozilla related stuff, and a more open one that took a broader scope of >>> content from contributors. Then let readers choose what they want. >>> Of course other ideas and insights are welcome. It's a growing >>> community. Scaling communities is no easier than scaling technology.
>>>> I don't know if it's the right channel to talk about this, but well, I >>>> guess you will redirect me to the right place if not :-) .
>>>> I thought that Planet was meant to spread/talk about stuff about >>>> Mozilla, but it seems we can talk about everything: current trend is >>>> about "Wordle", but we can also see posts about birth, politics, or >>>> whatever stuff totally unrelated with Mozilla, Open Web, ... well, the >>>> Manifesto.
>>>> Maybe I missed something, but I don't care about the feelings, life, >>>> or whatsoever about *ALL* the Mozilla contributors in Planet >>>> (unrelated with Mozilla). If I care about some of them (for something >>>> unrelated to Mozilla), I can subscribe to their own blogs!
>>>> As a Mozilla contributor, I'm overwhelmed with information: channels, >>>> blogs, websites, mailing-lists, newsgroups to watch, so this kind of >>>> information has nothing to do in Planet imho.
>>>> This is only my point of view. I won't argue or spend time anymore >>>> about this, I said everyting above.
>>>> If Planet was meant to gather everything, whatever the subject, forget >>>> my post.
> I agree. A general planet with everything (like now, or even broader), > and a second one that is a strict subset of the first, only reporting > really Mozilla-related stuff, might be a good idea.
Might work; I don't feel too strongly either way.
However, if we do this it has to be called pluto.mozilla.org. :-)
> It feels like it's time to do something about planet. I find it's > become overwhelming.
I haven't found it overwhelming yet in the literal sense of the word -- I do usually manage to keep up with posts, the vast majority of the time -- but it's definitely a very big firehose, very much "whelming", if not excessively so.
I think a big part of the problem of Planet-explosion is that we have sooo many people on Planet, with the reason being that the barrier to entry to Planet is too low. I've watched the Bugzilla component for Planet pretty much since its creation. I attempted to manually count the number of threads in my Planet folder for adding such things, not counting URL changes and the like, and I got to fifty before I grew tired of doing so; judging by scrollbar position there have been upwards of a hundred (and that doesn't even count additions between roughly June and October which I haven't read yet!). Of those, I believe *only one or two* have been rejected. There's a barrier to entry of filing a bug to be added to planet which presumably raises the success rate, but even still, I think a 99+% acceptance rate is too high regardless of the actual quality of the submissions (which, because they're made by humans, will never be perfect enough for all to merit inclusion).
(Warning: major flame-inducing statements below!)
To be perfectly frank, my impression is that most of that problem is due to newly-minted Mozilla Corporation employees requesting that their blogs be added before they've become known in the community. ("o hai, i iz new, plz read mai blog") Some (many? this is my gut feeling, not quantitative counts) such requests mention "new employee" as a qualification in the reasons to add but probably could not point to prior, visible public involvement. (I don't recall that question being asked in the "justification" phase of addition in any such requests.)
I think that's wrong.
You should be known to some portion of the community outside the Corporation *before* your blog is added, not *because* your blog is added. Whether that's through submitted patches, new feature implementations, some number of mentions in Mozilla meeting minutes with useful contributions each time, some number of mentions in blogs already syndicated to Planet, or some other metric like guest posts on already-syndicated blogs doesn't matter a whole lot to me as long as there's something that makes you well-known in some general sub-community that extends beyond the Corporation. It might be difficult to enumerate the ways in which this can happen, to be sure, but I think this would be a vastly better situation than the current one, where it's absolutely conceivable that you could get on planet in your very first day of employment with no prior presence in the community.
Oh, by the way, here are all my conflicts of interest for people to independently judge all of my ulterior motives. :-D
* Mozilla Corporation employee * *new* Mozilla Corporation employee (assuming you count a month and a half as new) * contributor with commit access since the Firefox pre-1.0 days, maybe 0.7ish * already syndicated on Planet * ...but syndicated since before employment started, although not before I'd begun making those plans * ...and syndicated after a few years of community involvement * probably an author of one of the posts mentioned in the original email that spawned the discussions here :-)
> I haven't found it overwhelming yet in the literal sense of the word > -- I do usually manage to keep up with posts, the vast majority of the > time -- but it's definitely a very big firehose, very much "whelming", > if not excessively so.
> I think a big part of the problem of Planet-explosion is that we have > sooo many people on Planet, with the reason being that the barrier to > entry to Planet is too low. I've watched the Bugzilla component for > Planet pretty much since its creation. I attempted to manually count > the number of threads in my Planet folder for adding such things, not > counting URL changes and the like, and I got to fifty before I grew > tired of doing so; judging by scrollbar position there have been > upwards of a hundred (and that doesn't even count additions between > roughly June and October which I haven't read yet!). Of those, I > believe *only one or two* have been rejected. There's a barrier to > entry of filing a bug to be added to planet which presumably raises > the success rate, but even still, I think a 99+% acceptance rate is > too high regardless of the actual quality of the submissions (which, > because they're made by humans, will never be perfect enough for all > to merit inclusion).
I should note that most of the people you are mentioning created a blog under peer pressure and posted once or twice ever. That said, yes the criteria right now is likely overly broad, and we could/should fix this. I'm not disagreeing with you , in fact I'm totally agreeing with you. I've been vocal about interns being on planet interns as sort of a purgatory for just this reason.
> (Warning: major flame-inducing statements below!)
> To be perfectly frank, my impression is that most of that problem is > due to newly-minted Mozilla Corporation employees requesting that > their blogs be added before they've become known in the community. > ("o hai, i iz new, plz read mai blog") Some (many? this is my gut > feeling, not quantitative counts) such requests mention "new employee" > as a qualification in the reasons to add but probably could not point > to prior, visible public involvement. (I don't recall that question > being asked in the "justification" phase of addition in any such > requests.)
> I think that's wrong.
I've got to agree with you on this. I think it's important to push people to be active in the community, and perhaps it should be a planet requirement. There are quite a few whose only qualifying attribute is an @mozilla.com email address.
Again most aren't really posting anything. That's not to say it's an issue.
Your response has a few gears in my head turning... I propose we do as follows (similar to suggestions of before but tweaked):
*planet.mozilla.org* planet.mozilla.org would contain any willing contributor who has been an active member of the community, without bias regarding employer or time with employer. Valid "activity" could include (but is not limited to) development, testing, marketing, developing addons, support, being a troll on #bs, etc. They should show evidence of a long term commitment and involvement to the project in whatever capacity they participate. Examples include prior involvement for a long period of time, substantial hours contributed, public speaking, credited in a Firefox release, well known by other members of the community, tattoo of Firefox logo on part of body that can be legally exposed in all 50 states.
The primary goal of planet is no longer to facilitate someone's work (though it would be great if it does) but to build community and showcase the talent and people of this community.
All blogs must be personal (no project blogs, company blogs, for example, or automation). Contributors all have a choice of syndicating their entire blog, or just a portion of it. We would prefer the entire blog.
All bugs requesting addition would be left open for a minimum of 1 week for anyone who cares to comment. Perhaps we'll even use the planet blog to make note of proposed additions?
I even propose we make this retroactive. We can contact participants and see if they want to include a full feed, avatar, etc.
*news.mozilla.org (or some other url)* This is new. It would be specifically for things of a more formal nature. DevNews, Metrics blog, etc. Perhaps a handful of people whose blogs are overly professional might have a feed included (perhaps cross posted to pmo) for example Mitchell's blog. All blogs asked to show some restraint in what they share to ensure it's not overwhelming. planet peers will police in the unlikely situation a blog creates more noise than signal. This would be 1 feed you can add to your feed reader and keep up on a professional level with what's happening product wise, marketing wise, and tech wise. Much more moderated and cleaner and mostly lolcat free.
This is intended to centralize information about current happenings. It would be awesome if there were a blog that would pick up on other posts from planet that could use some feedback/help, etc. and drive some traffic. Somewhat of an edited digest. For example if someone on pmo wanted feedback on some design.
*all planets* 1. For both I propose we modify the design to make the headline slightly larger and hide text after more than x # of pixels. This will make it easier to scan and find what you care about. 2. Hold content for a longer period of time so it's easier to read even if you haven't been following every hour. Not sure what the ideal amount of time is though. Suggestions? 3. Combine the headline with the name in the format "Name - Post title". I think it's easier to scan rather than use the headline/subhead format. planetsun.org does something like this, though I prefer a more prominent headline. IMHO that blends in to much when scanning quickly. Several other planets already do this (planetsun.org for example).
I haven't proposed or discussed these with other planet peers, so this is purely my personal proposal and shouldn't be interpreted any other way.
I also apologize for this being somewhat long and quickly written.
My post was short, and I feel like Mike followed up with some good perspective. But I thought it might be good to add on to what I said earlier.
I feel like there are a few things going on here, partially due to tools and also how people consume content that the community produces. I've been talking on and off with Asa, Deb, Dion and a few others about some high-level things we can do to help with that. Here's some context based on those discussions:
1. Planet. Planet is high-volume. It's everything about the people involved. The full collection of everyone, no matter how much time they spend on it - a little or a lot. It comes entirely without filters, and that's OK. Because that's what it's there for. I don't personally feel that the barrier for planet should be very high, just as the barrier for entry to our community should be very high, just because it causes more posts. We don't need fewer posts - we need better filters.[1]
2. Well-maintained content. We have a lot of this, it turns out. about:mozilla, about:addons, about:labs, web-tech, developer news, etc. There's a lot of it out there that we carefully garden. A human-powered filter, but a good one. We should be doing more to promote them and get more people reading them. Planet - the web site - is a good place to do that, and we're talking about how to do promote that content to people who want high-signal content with very little noise.
3. Creating some more filters. This is a decent amount of work. You need to ask the question - how do you filter to take all of the content that is created by our community (which is a lot!) and make it relevant to people? Or to a particular person? It's a hard problem, and one that is unlikely to be solved by more RSS feeds or making rules about how to use planet. That's self-censorship and doesn't really solve the underlying filtering problem. The labs guys have started to do some experiments here by using some of the Yahoo! web services out there, which is great. Finding that balance between the highly valuable content we produce (2) and the large noise of planet (1) is the trick.
A few weeks ago I talked met with Dion and Asa and we threw around some ideas on what we could do about this over the long term. [2] I think that we came up with some context for how to look at things over the long term, but in the short term there were two things that we could do that would help a lot. Those two things were:
1. Promote the gardened content that we have. For people involved on a day to day basis and are managing to keep up with planet it's probably not entirely useful, but for people who want something very high signal it's great. This means using planet (the web page) to promote the newsletter(s), web-tech, devnews, developer.mozilla.org and other places where know that people are going to learn something new every single day. It's way to hard to find the good stuff that we have. We can do a lot better here.
2. Come up with a guide that complements planet. Think of a cross between a high school yearbook and facebook and way to filter that list based on area of interest. Want to know who you should follow because you're interested in JavaScript? There's a highlighted list. Want to know what a person cares about? You can mouse over their picture (if they want it) and it gives a quick description of who they are, what they care about and other people that they tend to spend their time with as well. (Note: this needs a mockup - hard to describe without pictures!)
I think that fundamentally our community is getting to the point where it's large enough where it's impossible to know everyone and people will need tools to help them keep up with what they care about. It's a problem dealing with scale. And we're going to need tools that help with that. It's going to be a long project with some experiments, I think. This will likely be the first.
But just to connect with the start of this mail, I don't think that planet should change much. It's meant to be the whole, the everything of what we are as a community. I want to make sure we have one place like that and planet has always been that. But getting to where we have some filters to help us find the stuff we really care about will help quite a bit.
Mike Beltzner wrote: > At the core, though, I don't think we should restrict the flow of > information, words and collaborative spirit that makes up our community.
I agree.
Perhaps this is more of a problem for people who read planet in a "river of news" style (Google Reader?) rather than an "individual posts" style (e.g. Thunderbird). I can press "N N N" pretty quickly to move through posts I'm not interested in. Does Google Reader have a "scroll to top of next post" button?
Gervase Markham wrote: > Perhaps this is more of a problem for people who read planet in a "river > of news" style (Google Reader?) rather than an "individual posts" style > (e.g. Thunderbird). I can press "N N N" pretty quickly to move through > posts I'm not interested in. Does Google Reader have a "scroll to top of > next post" button?
Yes. "N". I used it all the time (and I do in fact read Planet in Google Reader).
> Perhaps this is more of a problem for people who read planet in a > "river > of news" style (Google Reader?) rather than an "individual posts" > style
I think, and I don't mean this pejoratively or pithily, that it's a problem for people who are reading Planet but don't actually want to be reading Planet. Instead they want to be reading a news service that points them to the primary on-goings of the community such as development news, announcements, new technology discussions, etc.
On 15-Dec-08, at 3:34 AM, Chris Blizzard wrote:
> 2. Well-maintained content. We have a lot of this, it turns out. > about:mozilla, about:addons, about:labs, web-tech, developer news, > etc. There's a lot of it out there that we carefully garden. A > human-powered filter, but a good one. We should be doing more to > promote them and get more people reading them. Planet - the web site > - is a good place to do that, and we're talking about how to do > promote that content to people who want high-signal content with very > little noise.
We also, fwiw, need to make sure that those are curated appropriately. For example, when Chris Double lands <video> in nightlies, WebTech should be there (if only to point to it). There's a cost to that, of course.
> (ps: one thing to note is that the meeting notes, which were recently > added to Planet, aren't working out that well since they're long, often > contain the same content that was copied from meeting to meeting, and > the bullet form often isn't helpful.
You're right that there's plenty of room for improvement, but just having the notes in planet has significantly improved my ability to stay on top of what's going on in various parts of the project that I don't have the bandwidth to pay a ton of attention to.
> I think if we actually want to include that sort of content, we should ask > meeting note-takers to create a "Summary" section in the respective wiki pages > and then just import that summary - with a link to the full notes - into Planet.)
