Peru and Microsoft announcement

[Pia Waugh]

Hi SJ,

<quote who="Samuel Klein">

> >> We don't have to frame it as us vs. them. We can just announce the
> >> state of current deployments, and discuss plans for future deployments
> >> and G1G1, including whatever can be said in public about the Microsoft
> >> trials. Everybody wants to know what's up with the Amazon deal, too.
> 
> We could have a formulaic "please check out our latest public
> announcements" email, and a list that media orgs can sign up to to
> receive regular pointers to longer announcements.  Something between
> the sporadic Press Release and the detailed weekly community-news
> blurbs.

Yes, that'd be awesome. Perhaps a monthly digest with highlights from the
community news, and anything that OLPC wants to communicate to the wide
world. It was mentioned the community news has only 2000 subscribers. I
didn't even know it was public although I've heard about it, and I've had
people be tentative about forwarding it thinking it was an "internal"
resource, so it probably needs to be promoted more as an open public
resource, if that is it's purpose.

> > I believe there is an internal newsletter, why doesn't OLPC have a monthly
> > public news feed that is on the main website that talks about stuff
> > happening which would give the world (and community trying to support OLPC)
> > the information we all need :) The amount of times I've had people both from
> > the FOSS community and the general community ask me what is going on is
> > crazy, and damaging. And I'm not even on the inside, I'm just involved with
> > some regional projects!
> 
> As mentioned elsewhere, we have a community-news list
> (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/community-news),  but it only goes
> out to some 2000 people.  It might be valuable to have a list for
> shorter, more specific announcements that includes a regular link to
> the community-news archive, and any major essays or press pieces,
> which we can broadcast to a much larger audience.

Definitely. An in which you can carefully message around the the successes
and taboo topics to help people get it right. I think most of the problem at
the moment is simply that people don't know what's going on half the time.

> > If it is any help, Im sure there are many people in the community who would
> > be happy to help (including me) with something like this, with keeping the
> > general public and community informed in a more public fashion. There is
> > generally a lot of good will towards the project around the world but real
> > and positive public information is key to maintaining that good will.
> 
> This is a good point.  For instance, it would be useful to post and
> wikify the community-news archives on the wiki (this would both give
> them much higher google rank and help highlight red-links for a number
> of efforts, deployments, or concepts that deserve public descriptions
> but don't have their own page yet on our wiki).

That'd be cool. It'd be great to have the latest post of community news and
this regular update on the front page with a link to the subscriptions. Why
don't you blog the updates so people can subscribe to the rss feed (and it
can be aggregated OLPCnews.com for instance).

Cheers,
Pia

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