Proposal: newsletter mailing list for contributor announcements

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi all,

As a follow-up to the discussions in the Advocacy&Outreach SIG, I would like to propose creating a new low-traffic mailing list for distributing news and contributor announcements.

The main reason for this mailing list is creating a channel of contacting contributors and plugin maintainers who do not regularly read the developer mailing list and whom we would like to contact in the case of major community events (hackathons, contributor summits, elections, etc.). Right now we have only a few options like using LDAP accounts and SendGrid, which is not very convenient for community organizers and does not offer contributors a way to opt-out.

I propose to use a new Google Group, e.g. "jenkins-contributor-announcements". Then we can update the website to reference it, and announce it through other channels. Not sure how effective it will be, but I think it worth trying. What do you think?

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev

[Richard Bywater]

Sounds like a good approach to me. 

I know it's stretching the scope of what you are talking about, but it would be also good to have some kind of "Action Required" type comms outside of the Dev mailing list for important changes that plugin maintainers need to know about to stop plugins breaking. Personally I find it hard to keep track of what I need to know vs what would be nice to know. Not sure if that fits within the scope of what you propose or whether that would be better attacked by, say, [ACTION REQUIRED] type subject lines in the Dev mailing list though.

Richard.

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[Mark Waite]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

[Oleg Nenashev]

> I know it's stretching the scope of what you are talking about, but it would be also good to have some kind of "Action Required" type comms outside of the Dev mailing list for important changes that plugin maintainers need to know about to stop plugins breaking. 

Yes, this is a good thing to do, especially in the case of the 2.277.x release when many users were affected.

+1 for that, especially if we aggregate all key upcoming changes in a single digest.

[Olblak]

Hi Everybody,

I am definitely in favor of a new low traffic channel to distribute major news, I share Richard's opinion, I also find it difficult to keep up in the dev mailing list.

Personally, I would suggest using something more generic like "jenkins-announcement" and maybe using tags in the subject but we should keep it read-only and very low traffic

While I am not a big fan of the Google group, it remains the easiest solution :/.

I wouldn't be in favor of using the Sendgrid mailing list, mainly for access management.

[Oleg Nenashev]

I would have been in favor of "jenkins-announcement" if it was a user newsletter (which we could introduce as well).

In this case I am rather about contacting contributors specifically, and I'd like to distinguish the name somehow.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

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[Tim Jacomb]

jenkins-dev-announce ?

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[Ullrich Hafner]

+1 for the name and for the idea of such a mailing list

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[Gavin Mogan]

So while the concept is a good one, I have concerns about the execution. Lets say you had a new announcement next week, would you just post to that list, knowing that most people havn't signed up for it yet, or would you cross post every announcement to dev, docs, infra, and announcements for the next year or so? Who would have access to post to it? Anyone? Board members? sig leads?

Its the same problem lots of reddit subredits have. People find a sub list too noisy, create more specialized subs, and then both become more empty. I'm scared of that happening here Especially since dev mailing list only gets a couple posts a day.

My vote is to reach out to discourse for a sponsorship, and move all async communication there. Instead of having like 8 mailing lists, and having to know which one to use, and new users to know which ones to sign up for, it would be a single thing. And if people post to the wrong form then it could be moved to the right place, or in the case of spam outright deleted. Discourse has email support so for those who prefer email, they can still post and reply via email. Plus it would mean it wouldn't be google and we could have ldap, google, github and twitter logins like we do for.

(Full disclosure, I'd love to centralize on discourse for async and matrix for sync)

Not at all blocking this idea, just voicing concerns.

Gavin

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[Oleg Nenashev]

> So while the concept is a good one, I have concerns about the execution. Lets say you had a new announcement next week, would you just post to that list, knowing that most people havn't signed up for it yet, or would you cross post every announcement to dev, docs, infra, and announcements for the next year or so?

I think that the existing mailing lists should remain the source of truth. One of the key reasons - they allow the discussion. I consider the announcements channel as a secondary notification channel where we might be sending summaries and reposting announcements, but not a replacement for any existing channel.

> Who would have access to post to it? Anyone? Board members? sig leads?

TBD. Taking the intent above, it should be rather a small set of users.

Maybe we could apply email-as-code by using GitHub Actions or Jenkins Pipelines (e.g. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/send-email for the first option)

> My vote is to reach out to discourse for a sponsorship, and move all async communication there

It is something we could discuss and try out. Not sure it addresses the original purpose of the thread, I would not like to boil the ocean now.

But yes, it is definitely an option we could consider.

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[Oleg Nenashev]

After the introduction of community.jenkins.io, maybe creating a mailing list does not make sense anymore.

There is already a category for announcements created by Olivier: https://community.jenkins.io/t/about-the-announcement-category/40

Instead of the original idea, I suggest the following:

• We create categories for user and contributor announcements on Discourse. Maybe topic in those categories should be locked by default, but I would rather keep them open to allow live discussion
  
• Nice2Have: Connect the announcement feeds to...
  • Subscription mailing list (maybe)
    
  • Atom Feeds
  • Telegram channels
  • IRC
  • etc....

Best regards,

Oleg

[Gavin Mogan]

I added a rss bot to jenkinsci/jenkins gitter channel, but since I don't have admin in the gitter i can't add subscriptions

in theory, ` !rss subscribe https://feeds.feedburner.com/ContinuousBlog/` should be enough to make it work. If that does, we can have rss from discourse too

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