News Queue

This is a page is about how news gets posted for www.osgeo.org.

= News Editor = News for osgeo.org goes through a news editor that ensures some degree of consistency and appropriateness. Currently the news editor is Frank Warmerdam with backup editor Jo Walsh.

= news.osgeo.org =

The project at https://news.osgeo.org/ will be used as the portal for all project news and site news. Major announcements and OSGeo-specific news will also have pointers from the main WWW project's Announcement function. On further consideration, I'm not sure we even need the news.osgeo.org project, and I would suggest we just move all the content currently on it to the www.osgeo.org project.

= Submitting News =

Email new news items to news_item@osgeo.org. This goes to the news editors. Projects, committees or other interested parties can submit a news item to that mailing list. Then the editor (or if they are unavailable, the backup editor) would take care of formatting the item for consistency and putting it on the news page. If the item is considered important enough, it would also appear on the www.osgeo.org main page.

It might also be reasonable for the news mailing list to be "subscribed" to an email feed from the various project announcement do-hickies, but I'm not really sure if they produce email or if this is worthwhile since the announce feature isn't currently much used.

On occation the news editors may also post items based on stuff they see happening without explicit direction, though this isn't the main task of the editor.

= Mechanics of Posting =

News Items
New news items go into www/content/news/news_archive/news_archive.html in the www project CVS repository. Please use similar styling to what is there (h3 headers for item, include date). HTML is currently constructed by hand.

Periodically items should be moved from Current News to Archived News. I imagine anything older than 2 months should no longer be consider current.

If the news item is substantial, added it to the main page in the file www/DomainHome.html.html in www project CVS. Search for "Current News" to find the insertion point. Make sure a div is used for each item, like is done for the rest. Other than that, the same html from the news_archive.html should be ok.

Event Items
New events should be added to www/content/news/event_archive/event_archive.html in the www project CVS repository. Please use similar styling to what is there.

Please move events that are in the past down to the Past Events section.

While missing now (July/2006) it is intended that events should include a link to a VisCom wiki page about the OSGeo presence there, so that folks can help man the booth, etc.

Generally speaking we should only be listing events that OSGeo will appear at in some fashion, or that are especially pertinent to our mission.

Significant events should appear on the main osgeo news page for a couple weeks up to and including their occurance.

Developer Spotlights
Developer spotlights currently live in www/developer_spot/index.html in the news.osgeo.org project's SVN repository.

= Main Page =

An effort should be made to trim older news items of the main page. We should likely aim to just have 4-6 items on the main page at any given time, including news items and events. It isn't entirely clear whether we want to put developer spotlights in the news stream on the main page.

= VisCom Press Releases =

Some effort should also be made to ensure that any VisCom press releases make it into the news stream, and vice versa that major announcements are proposed to viscom as press releases. (need to link to viscom pr page...)