[infobitt-talk!] Coordinating category work

[Larry Sanger]

Vivy and some of you have coordinated some work on categories.

I'm looking for ideas about how to get people thinking and caring about categories. What's going to make it interesting?

Here are some ideas, just brainstorming at this point. Please add some and discuss:

• We have a Google Docs spreadsheet that lists names of people who commit to n bitts in category per day or week.
• Those names I personally update weekly as "Infobitt featured writers" in the FAQ and a weekly Infobitt Daily Update feature.
• We do a daily ad hoc edition (not the one posted on the site, but just a snapshot taken some other time during the day). I'd like to space these out throughout the day so there's always a category deadline approaching.
• I reach out to our now rather large (many thousands) big mailing list to engage them in this way.
• We take volunteers to have people do what Vivy does, but for categories, just once per day. I'm thinking we'd do this on Infobitt Daily Update...but wouldn't this entail too much mail?
• Alternatively, we can make new mailing lists (e.g., Infobitt-World or Infobitt-Tech) and update subscribers there. My worry is that there wouldn't be many subscribers. But who know knows; maybe there would be after the big mailing list announcement.
• Maybe contributors choose a top "focus" category for each category each day, and those are announced on the category mailing list.
• I, Vivy, and perhaps volunteers would have to do a lot of specific topic recruitment. For example, for World News, we might try to get announcements done on mailing lists for students and professors of international studies, or journalists, or whatever.

Whatever we do must be simple. As I think of it at present, it's just (a) a list of featured writers, refreshed weekly, for each category; (b) daily (once/day) editions in the category, posted on a new category mailing list for which (c) we do a lot of recruitment.

It would be better if it were done without any such organization, but sometimes, even in the context of a wiki, such organization can help.

--Larry

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Larry Sanger

Founder/CEO, Infobitt.com