How to promote an event: some changes on wiki.d.o and a guideline

[d-events-* lists cc-ed as it's strictly related to events' organization
- and I don't know if people from those lists are subscribed to
-publicity. please maintain the discussion on -publicity, sorry for who
will received it twice :) ]

[TL;DR: created a template on wiki.d.o for events pages + minor
re-organization of the DebianEvents* pages. Rationale: allowing a better
handling of data for global event team and a simpler overview of event
organized for wiki.d.o users. Added also a guideline for events promoting
+ a little tasks list for events team]

Hi all,

as many of you probably know, during a recent discussion on how to handle
event's promoting (see #652631) we talked about how to proper
handle the organization and promoting of events.
During that discussion we basically all agreed on two main points:

        * the decentralized structure used til now (i.e.: organizing
        the event via debian-events-* regional mailing list + wiki page)
        is the best option in terms of convenience and usefulness;

        * the promoting part (at global and local level) could be greatly
        improved: the bootleneck seems the communication between local
        organizers and global team (responsible, for instance, of
        updating the /events/ section of www.debian.org )

As the local organizers use wiki.d.o pages to coordinate the event, the
global team use mostly the wiki as source for data to be included in
www.d.o.
For this reason, thanks to the suggestions of Paul Wise and Jonas
Smedegaard, I tried yesterday to uniformize the events page of the wiki:
please note that if there are strong objections to these changes I can
easily revert them, and I'd particularly like to hear the opinion of
people who usually organize events (as my pov could differ from theirs: I
just handle data, they actually organize things!).

First of all I've created a template [1] to add events to the wiki, based
on the well-organized pages for german events. The "Details" paragraph
contain all the data necessary for creating the related page on
www.debian.org (and next step will be try to automagically process them).
I've also added to the DebianEvents page (which if I'm not wrong was used
as "central" node for local events) a form [2] to easily create a new
event page: just entering the name of the page (using the
<country-code>/<year>/<event-name> namescheme) you'll be able to directly
create a page already based on the template.
Then I've renamed all the events page I found using the namescheme
<country-code>/<year>/<event-name>: it will allow us to use a couple of
macro in listing the events.

There's still a bit of work to do on the DebianEvents page: for instance
clearly state that local group regular meetings should be added instead
on the LocalGroups/ hierarchy, or create a calendar of the events using
the MonthCalendar macro [3].

As a sidenote, I'd also like to point out that I've started a draft of
guidelines for promoting events (it's really a draft, I mean: it contains
just the basical steps, improvements welcome, especially from people with
some on-field experience!) and a little list of tasks for the events
team, both on the events team page [4].

Thank you for your attention (yes, this was a long one!),
Francesca

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/Template
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents#Adding_a_new_event
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/HelpOnMacros/MonthCalendar
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Events

-- 
"Nostra patria è il mondo intero
e nostra legge è la libertà
ed un pensiero
ribelle in cor ci sta."		P.Gori

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-events-eu-REQUEST_at_lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster_at_lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120314122656.GC11765@zouish.org