Open Stack

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the Superuser editorial advisory mailing list!

The purpose of this list is for coordinating among ourselves and to get
your input. It’s a public list to which anyone can subscribe or send
feedback/ideas about the publication, but we expect it will primarily be
the editorial team and advisors.

Thank you for volunteering to help and for those of you that attended our
first meeting at the Atlanta Summit. The editorial team came away with a
great deal of insight from the discussion, and we want to continue
iterating and building out plans for the publication with your feedback.

For those who are new or were unable to attend in Atlanta, we've captured
notes from the meeting below. We are also sharing a few collaborate
documents for your input, and have a few specific follow up questions and
areas that we think warrant continued discussion.

*Primary Takeaways from Atlanta*
​- Consider two audiences: We had originally scoped the Superuser
publication to focus on the operator community, folks who are setting up
and running cloud infrastructure. From the meeting, it seems like there is
interest in expanding that scope to also include the app dev / API consumer
audience. We are certainly open to this feedback, but need some help
setting the editorial direction and identifying the best resources to get
involved.
- Highlight release development progress: There were several people who
wanted the publication to report on the software development progress,
especially highlighting issues where operators may want to weigh in or get
involved, possibly driving users back to the appropriate mailing list
conversations. What’s the best process and format for these updates? We
need to highlight the important conversations that are happening on the
mailing lists, in IRC, and other channels. How do we capture conversations
and bring them back in ways that the broader community can consume them?
- Developer and user feedback loop: How can we build empathy between
developers and operators? Focus on the combined effort as the solution
rather than the problem itself, or the dichotomy of users and/or
developers. For example, Developer and Operator interaction and "success
stories.” How can we discover these interactions?
- Consider product and vendor reviews: Several saw the value in sharing
their experiences with vendors, but we discussed whether this was
appropriate and how we would need to approach it in a very balanced way
(like giving the vendors a heads up if there was an article appearing about
them for a chance to comment). It’s not something we need to settle on
right away, but can see how the content evolves and what makes the most
sense.
- Business case also important: Another role several of you see for this
publication is to help provide the business value content needed to help
sell OpenStack internally (or to users/customers). We may even want to tag
this by industry over time.
- Help users along the journey: There should be content for beginners, as
well as more advanced users, and we should find a way to tag that
appropriately and help drive people to the best resources or next steps.
- Video is an important medium, especially for the business value content
and shorter attention spans :)  We will of course have a significant amount
of video content from the Summit that we can curate/summarize/tag for the
publication.
- Users that came to the Superuser booth expressed the need to have more
basic how-tos and guides. We may play a role in helping market appropriate
documentation and guides that the community has already developed.
- If you attended, please feel welcome to add your notes or thoughts here​

*​Next Steps*​
- Please weigh in on any of the comments and takeaways above. We
specifically need more input and help scoping out how we’ll highlight
release development process, dev/user feedback stories and whether we
should target end user / app developers initially.
- We are planning one major/topical feature story per month. Please help us
review the editorial calendar and provide input on the topics, whether you
like it, think we should skip it, or have ideas about a specific angle we
should take:
https://docs.google.com/a/openstack.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Atf9_ocTTlmLdDFVTTRoTTlNUFFCYkxlLXJKMjZwUkE&usp=drive_web#gid=4
- We have one feature article in flight about best practices for building
OpenStack skills and career development. If you have any ideas or know of
anyone we should speak to, please let us know.
- Based on the feedback from the first meeting, we’re considering
re-working the navigation. We’ll wait a few weeks to gather more feedback
and see how the content develops before making any major changes, but we’re
open to feedback and will circulate some ideas to the mailing list.
- We are always looking for more contributors and and guest authors. Do you
know of anyone that is blogging about how they use OpenStack?  Do you
relationships with any technical writers or even journalists we might hire
for a feature story?

One quick note on promotion. We launched the publication at the Summit so
we could start getting the community involved and capture content at the
event. While we would definitely like to start building a core audience and
promoting great articles, we have deliberately held off on bigger campaigns
to amp up readership until we get our feet under us. We’d like a chance to
incorporate the feedback you’ve provided and build up a good base of
content over the next few weeks, and then we’ll start to put more marketing
muscle behind it.

Our next in person meeting will be at the Paris summit. In the meantime,
please share your ideas, comments, feedback, questions about Superuser on
this list. Let's keep the conversation going.

Thank you again for taking the time to participate in what we hope will
become a valuable resource for the OpenStack community!

​Best,
Nate​


-- 

Nate Gandomi // Jones-Dilworth, Inc.
M: 510-999-6283 // @ngandomi <https://twitter.com/ngandomi> // Skype:
ngandomi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/superuser/attachments/20140522/0a9df6f2/attachment.html>