 Hi, everybody. I am Matthew Miller and this is a Fedora Council video meeting. We do these about once a month The Fedora Council tries to conduct our business and have an asynchronous online ways You know chat and mailing lists. We're moving actually now to the discourse forum Which is actually a thing I want to ask the magazine people here about in a little bit But we discovered that having regular meetings is important for having a cadence of getting things done And having these video meetings lets us do some kind of high bandwidth things kind of keeps people tied together And we dedicate them once a month to some part of the project where something interesting is going on that we would like to Know more about or that we would like to highlight And so this month we are looking at Fedora magazine Fedora magazine is not actually a magazine. It is a blog But it is kind of meant to have kind of high quality user-focused content about the About what's going on in the Fedora community. And so we have Gregory Bartholomew and Stephen Snow here Gregory is standing outside in the University campus and Stephen I think doesn't have any video But both here to talk about this so welcome tell us about yourselves and about the throw magazine Hi I'm here at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I'm borrowing their Wi-Fi because well I wasn't real confident in my home Wi-Fi, especially uploading video. I'm new to this video in a conference thing So we'll see how it goes Yeah, I joined well Thank you. Hopefully there's not too much wind or other noises or the Signals decent You're doing All right, I'm glad to hear it. Thank you the I probably joined the magazine a couple years ago. I just saw a an ad on the sidebar said You know, we're looking for contributors writers and I've been working here at this University for over 20 years For the computer science department. I figured I have a little experience. I ought to be able to write a little little how-to on an odd subject or two from time to time and So I joined in yeah Any other questions, I don't know Let's hear from Steven introduction Steven Snow I I've been a fedora user for quite a number of years and I started writing actually for the magazine as a challenge by C Verna one of the editors of the magazine He had written an article about something that was sort of Microsoft oriented and I said well Why don't you do that in a fedora land thing and? That's how I started writing for the magazine Nice came an editor Guess well didn't seem to be a lot of people volunteering for that and I felt like I needed to contribute Yeah, that's that's a good way when you see a need step up. Thank you for doing that See the Fedora magazine when I started as project leader was Not going very well There was barely any content at all and I started doing a weekly thing called five things in fedora this week Which wasn't great, but it was some content every week and then just having that content every week Started other people paying attention to it a little bit more and it kind of got built and built from there And for a while a couple of Red Hatters were putting a lot of their actual work time into doing it when They weren't actually supposed to be paid for that and Then started putting in there out of work time as well But in order for it to be sustainable We really needed to build up something that was community led rather than you know Red Hat led because this is not something that red hats going to pay for they like to pay for engineering things So it's awesome that you are here helping with this. We really appreciate that Do you have can you tell us some about like the current state of the magazine? Does it feel? Does it feel like it's self-sustaining at this point? Does it need help? Does it? Go ahead I was going to say a lot of times we we hit our spells of dry Not enough content. There's a lot of good ideas Spec already a article column and Tanban is full of good ideas. We just don't have a lot of people in the effort into She knows those ideas for articles So yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. He said there's a can ban maybe not everybody knows what a can ban is but basically that's a Online board of like post-it notes of ideas that can be moved from column to Like starting on a left column of this is a crazy idea to the right column of this is a finished article across the process And so there is a can ban board on a team stuff at our project at org. Is that correct? And we'll put a link on YouTube about this Where story ideas can be how do how do story ideas get put on that board? What's what's the process? The source right now mostly is from discourse Okay, and that's discussion.fadoreproject.org on the magazine category. We also look at What's up and coming in the test cycles So who puts the ideas if you have an idea like that's discussed in the in the forum Who puts that onto the taiga board or the the can ban board? Usually the second editor who gives the idea plus one Okay, so that's basically two editors look at it We like to achieve two plus ones just Be of content I would guess Okay every article coming in Yeah, that's good a commitment to some quality is appreciated always in fedora And then so then once they're there on that ideas board Can anybody pick up an idea like if somebody's listening to this right now and has you know clicks clicks on the link that will provide and Once to wants to go see what's going on and they see something they're interested in Everybody is welcome to contribute to any of the spec articles Pick a spec article and contribute to it. You're you're more than welcome to do so Okay, and then what's the process for that? The magazine WordPress instance using your FAS account or account sign on Also sign on to the taiga Fedora's taken instance for the magazine project. So it's good. Go ahead No, I let's say I haven't used WordPress or done blogging before You know I've written some stuff, but I haven't done that. How hard is this like can the average person do this? Or do you need to add some technical skills? Beyond the ratings it's almost well I mean once once you have your FAS account and you sign up It's pretty easy to fall into doing any of these things You can write about use a text editor basically you should be able to Contribute an article if you have an idea that you want Okay cool You are saying something else you want to go on with I interrupted you about I Guess I was basically going to the process of trying to get your article started, but yeah, go ahead so once once you've signed up there you get invited by one of the editors and Then you can begin the process of working on your article and If you've taken it from a spec and you're actually Have some content sitting at WordPress now you want to move it into the in-progress column you do so When you're ready to do so and When you feel the article is complete enough you move it into the review column the the take a card that starts in the spec column Okay, maybe you basically just move it from one step to the next and then somebody the editor picks it up for review and publishing Yeah, on Wednesdays, we have a meeting at 0800 UTC to talk about the up-and-coming article potentials that are there and What state they're at and whether they go to editing or whether they need to go back to in progress and Get in touch with the authors and verify the situation for them. So they know what's happening Cool. How many people participate in that meeting regularly? usually we have a minimum of about three people and Sometimes we have upwards of eight or nine. Just nice. Okay. Yeah, that sounds pretty healthy. Yeah, cool We have occasionally had just one That's that's what's good Yeah, I from what I've seen it tends to tends to veer towards the lower end of that spectrum um, I kind of come and go myself Uh, and that's something if you do want to contribute, um, I would say You know, even if you just want to do an article once in a great while Anything's welcome and I didn't actually intend to become an editor either by the way Uh, I started out as a writer. I was just gonna write a few articles and see how it went And I jumped in on the IRC I wasn't uh, I wasn't clear that it was just for editors I really just wanted to chat a little bit about my article and make sure everything was clear You know, there weren't any problems and uh, I kind of got volunteered up into doing some editorial work So that's kind of the way it goes once you get started You'll get you'll get some nudges, you know, if if they like your writing style I guess it may depend on, you know, some of your skills a little bit, but But uh, yeah, you can easily get uh, drafted into more and more things It might be a good place to get started if you if you want to just contribute if you have the time If you have a little know-how Uh, it doesn't take much anything you can contribute. It's great. We're we're looking for writers. We're looking for editors That's one great thing about fedora is if you keep showing up people will find work for you to do Oh, yeah Anybody anybody with any computer skills. There's there's just you you can find work very easy It's uh, it's harder to find free time for most of us. I think true um What I I noticed that every magazine article has a nice graphic that goes with it. Where do those come from? um those uh There a lot of them are just uh photos. I'm not I'm still learning some of the rules Like I said, I kind of come and go and I I miss things sometimes and and they've been changing a lot of things Recently that that peiga or can band thing. That's all new of course discourse or was it called discussion dot fedora That's all new. So a whole lot of things are in flux. I guess that's the norm for fedora From what I can tell But uh, the system seems to be improving all the time and as for the photos, um They uh, there's some online sites where you can get, um, cc Uh, what do you call it creative creative commons license photos? Yeah creative commons licensed photos Which is what is what they prefer? And usually they require attribution I think cc zero didn't require attribution but some of the newer licenses do so we have to be a little careful with that That's something we're trying to do a little better. I think some of our photos in the past didn't have well They may have been cc zero. I'm not sure if there were any issues but but um But we're trying to attribute everything we can and if uh and sometimes we just make them up A lot of times we'll use some fedora background off of uh, a fedora You know, it might be an even an old edition of fedora. I've grabbed some of those backgrounds. Some of them are still They you know, they look as good as they did but hey, they were published, right? Uh, we like to use the fedora backgrounds because the licenses are good on those and um And sometimes they're just a plain background If you have some art skills, uh, we could probably use some artists like I I am not an artist I got into the computer business Because that was more my skill set but But if you can uh, fill a little with uh, inkscape inkscape create some layers, you know, just I don't think uh, I don't think the art you say you were impressed by it, but uh I think you I guess I thought every Every article has an image that goes with it. It makes it kind of visually appealing. It's not just a you know text blog I think that's nice. Is there a connection with the fedora design team or is it done mostly independently? Uh, it's what I've done is totally independent I think the idea was that There was supposed to be somebody with that skill set that would do the images But I don't think we really have a good artist In our team. Okay, at least not it not currently that i'm aware of and we've we've been just The editors have been getting have been doing some of the images as well Just doing the best we can I think um, paul field or field Harvey says name field is uh, yeah Yeah, he's he's tried to put together some sort of video just recently That's supposed to teach us how to do some basic like shadows or something as I understand it, but uh It's uh, I I think it's still in in the works. Uh I haven't seen it yet, but um, but yeah, they're they're we're trying to we're trying to do better with the the graphics And have a little fun with it. Um, you know, you can be a little creative I did one here just recently Uh for the encryption article it was getting started with stratus and I was kind of happy. I thought that was kind of creative A lot of people may not know what that was that was on the photo there But it's actually an ancient encryption tool It was a I can't remember the name of it. You'd have to look it up on Wikipedia or something But but it's like an old tool romans used to use to encrypt messages. They'd take a ribbon Nice, and they'd wrap they'd wrap it around a oh, yeah Right for doing a Caesar cipher. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool cipher. Right. Yeah So, yeah, you know, whatever you can think of whatever comes to mind and uh, yeah, if you can uh, fiddle with it a little bit and And I'm gonna look this up real quick There are no standards that I'm aware of for you know, how good the image is Like a third guy I've been making it up as I go A skytally I guess Yeah, anyways, uh, sorry. That was very distracting for me. Let me get back to focus One of the things I think we might be able to do I mean having you here is connect you more closely with the fedora design team Unfortunately, marie can't be here today But she's um our fedora community outreach and impact coordinator and she's you know Works on the mindshare team and with the fedora design team as well And maybe we can make more of a like a workflow connection so that People on the design team can look at the articles in progress and make sure that there's like that's it That's an easy task for new people to the design team as well that can kind of help that Connection go that would be awesome. Sounds great I think historically a lot of the reason we haven't done that is just because the lead time is pretty short between Time when the article comes in is sort of ready and then it gets published It's like ryan lurch is an editor technically still But so he was doing a lot of the image work early on because he's also a member of the design. Yeah but yes lately it's it's We don't have a long publish window generally and so like you know Having the editors or the authors do their own image Hence to allow us to publish, you know on time All right, so another question I had was about statistics Do you know do you have offhand ideas of how well the site does and what kind of numbers we see? I have that open right now matthew. Do you then? I anticipated your question so we average Roughly 280 to 300,000 page views a month over the last year plus We have a lot of articles where individual articles get You know up to up to a 5000 views is pretty common 10 for some of the the bigger ones obviously like the release announcements get a ton of views And then articles about Sometimes more controversial or very topical content It's like the we had a system d resolve d article fairly recently and that's one of the big fedora 33 features that You're still getting the clicks is what you're saying Yeah, amazing But you know, I would say most articles these days get at least a thousand views just because You know, this is sort of the place that people go for Fedora content, you know, it's on the the start dot fedora project dot org page And a lot of I think a lot of people who cover the linux space Pay close attention to what goes on in the magazine because that's how they find out what they need to be covering from a fedora standpoint Cool. Yeah, that that's quite a lot. So this is also a way for you as a writer to get your Writing out to a wider audience if that's something you're interested in well um So are there things that are not going so well in the magazine that that council could help with I mean, I'll let steven and gregory Disagree with me, but I think for the most part we're a finely tuned machine right now. Um, you know Like we were saying earlier, we sometimes get lull a lull in content Which usually then is averaged out by a whole bunch of content coming in all at once so, you know on average it works out but just You know, we we could always stand to have more more writers and more editors join in But I I wouldn't say there's any area where we're particularly flailing at the moment Okay, um, I guess that brings me to the side question, which is When you have that glut of content or some do you schedule those to go out over a period of weeks? Or do you tend to run it as it as it's ready? Is is there an editorial calendar? Really depends on the level of content of the each of the articles So if their quality is there we'd like to publish three articles a week We can plan out a couple weeks Have six articles That makes sense Yeah, so so we have one article then Yeah, right It's hard to stretch one article over for several weeks um a few months ago we we kind of came to the conclusion that If we don't have three articles for a week, we should just take a deep breath and that's okay Um, so we've had some weeks where we've only published two or one. I don't think we've had any We didn't any weeks. We didn't have anything to publish Um, but you know, it doesn't seem like it really hurts our overall engagement If we have a slow week here and there because you know At some point we'll have plenty of content and then we'll have you know, two or three weeks Basically scheduled out ready to go Yeah, I feel like as long as Go ahead I was just saying I think our audience really likes quality too Yeah, rather than just putting filler in there for the sake of filler There's some level where you've got to make sure there's content You know at least once a week to make sure people know that it's not dead, but Hopefully doesn't that isn't an issue very much. It sounds like it isn't um One of the other questions I wanted to say is fedora does have some budget for things and this year actually um Not that we're I have money to throw away, but because there's less travel than usual We do actually have some money to spend for the rest of the year Are there things in the magazine that money could help with? The answer can be no, but um anything from the wordpress side that we could pay for to have capabilities or writing capabilities on the site There are some issues with the interpretation of markdown it seems But I know that could just be who The author's choice of editor at Yeah Honestly, I can't think of anything that wouldn't be an ongoing cost like, you know, it would be great to You know pay pay the pay writers. For example, that would be awesome. Um, but That becomes very unsustainable very quickly Yeah, I I do believe writers deserve one-time things This is a labor of love kind of kind of situation which I really appreciate especially for the good writers who's, you know Writing does deserve it is worth something. Uh, and I think one of the things About that is everything in the magazine is Creative Commons license So by contributing to the magazine, you're not just contributing to fedora But you are contributing to the greater good of open source public documentation and you know People can take what's written and adapt it for a different linux distribution or a different use case Or it can be put into Into you know the doc site of arch linux wiki. Welcome. Welcome to take our documentation Add it add it to their beautiful site as well. It's all part of the big movement of sharing, which is awesome Neil you had a question in the chat a long time ago. Do you want to say it in real life? Sure. Um So we've been talking about this as a fedora magazine. That's not very magazine-ish What what would it What's stopping us from producing like an actual Digital formatted magazine formatted style thing with the content, you know, maybe not necessarily regularly, but like as some kind of fun Celebratory or one off whatever kind of thing to kind of show You know The best of the magazine or something like that in in in an actual magazine form to just you know As a bit of eye candy for for people who frequent The fedora magazine I mean nothing's stopping us. There's just nobody stepping up to do it um Yeah, I can I would I can take a little beat on that To to do a printable format requires several stuff not only the articles You need to do you need to do the what is called? Uh Schematic schematic of how the digital format is going to be Also, you need to Agree it in a format. I think uh A beautiful format could be pdf, but maybe ebook or or something and there is Also, if you are going to do for example, an special edition with what you think is the best You need to select the articles that that could be the the most easy part because uh, you can just take the statistics that was the most Viewed article and and pick from there but uh, also, I think uh, it requires some commitment and time and work to do that is not easy to do and Is I think it's a word that is beyond the writers, you know, because it's more dedicated to the format not only to the article because writers Thankfully, we have a lot of great people reading articles in the magazine Maybe that's something that would be Something we could Ask the design team to look at if they would be interested in not necessarily as you have to do this, but here's an idea Put that together Yeah, I think it'd be kind of nice if we could you know get a limited edition print run made and you know send that as like a thank you gift to the people who You know contributed articles to that or you know something like that because It's kind of fun. Um, you know, I've I've written for open source.com for many years and they do a yearbook every year where they take You know some content is directly for it and some's just reprinted from the site Uh, they have it available for sale But everyone who contributed to that yearbook gets a free print copy It's just kind of cool to have and like you know something have something tangible to hold in your hands And you know, it's kind of nice. Thank you An annual thing kind of like it's like the year and review kind of thing And depending on how expensive that is to make that might be something that would be fun to give out at conferences Or even you know to sell for five dollars at Fosdame or whatever And you could throw it up on the red hat cool stuff store randomly We could maybe I don't know if we can put bespoke merchandise on the cool stuff store And the cool stuff store is really just a you know It's secretly like zazzle or something in the back end, right? It's not Anyways, um That's red hats online swag store if anybody's paying attention. Um, okay Yeah, we actually had some stuff there for a while, but the logistics of it are kind of annoying so We'll work on that again sometime. Um, any other questions for the magazine folks Okay, well, thank you very much for being here answering questions Being subjected to interrogation Thank you ben for helping out with the stats And with that I will conclude. Bye everybody Bye