I’m seeing a bit more interest in sending things to opensuse-announce lately, which is a good thing (in my opinion) but I’d like some feedback from other community members on what does and doesn’t belong on the -announce mailing list.

The description of the announce mailing list here says that announce is for “announcements concerning the openSUSE Project” which is good, if a bit vague.

Obviously, meeting announcements and reminders should go to the announcement mailing list. Things like downtime announcements and news that affects the entire project seems like a no-brainer as well.

But what about announcements that are specific to sub-projects or things like meeting minutes, requests for testing of beta packages (like, say OpenOffice.org)?

The goal is to make sure that important project news is seen by anyone who would be interested and/or affected by something will see it — not trivial, given the size of our overall community and the amount of things going on at any given time.

At the same time, sending too many announcements means that some percentage of people will leave announce because the traffic is too high. Something I’m very wary of – we need to increase the number of subscribers to -announce anyway, not lose subscribers.  It’s not uncommon that I hear someone say “I didn’t know about that!” when it was sent to -announce fairly recently…

Posting to opensuse-announce:

If you’re doing something of interest to the large openSUSE community, feel free to send an announcement to the -announce mailing list: The list is moderated, so if it’s not appropriate for the list, it shouldn’t go through. (Though there have been a few things that have slipped through moderation…)

What should an announcement look like?

Check over the archives if you’d like to see things that have gone before. Generally – you want to have a descriptive headline that makes it clear why the announcement is relevant/interesting.

If possible, the first line or two of the email should give the most important details (the “who, where, when, what, why and how” of the announcement) and then fill in detail in subsequent paragraphs.

• Announcements don’t need to be long: They can be a couple of sentences if that’s all that’s necessary.
• Announcements don’t need to be formal or great prose: Conversational tone is fine, and the announcement doesn’t have to sound like it was written by a professional copywriter. (Avoiding spelling and basic grammatical errors is a good thing, though.)
• Announcements should have all the relevant details and/or a link to a wiki page with everything that the reader needs.
• It’s a good idea to include contact info for follow-up questions.

If you’re unsure about whether your news is “worthy” of -announce, feel free to email me or ask on the opensuse-marketing list.

Finally – note that you need to be subscribed to opensuse-announce in order to post to the list.

Subscribing to opensuse-announce:

If you’re not already subscribed to opensuse-announce, it’s easy to do and just takes a few seconds. (The whole process can be completed in under a minute, usually.)

Just send an email to opensuse-announce+subscribe@opensuse.org. (You don’t need a subject or body for the mail.) Then look for a note in your inbox that asks you to reply to confirm the subscription.

If you want to unsubscribe, it’s just as easy: send an email to opensuse-announce+unsubscribe.

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