Get involved: 3 Community Projects

Post by **clem** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 5:40 am

Hi,

If you want to get involved here are some of the projects we would like the community to maintain:

mintMag

mintMag is a monthly magazine about Linux Mint and Linux in general. It comes as a PDF and was published only once in the past. You can find issue 001 of mintMag here:

http://linuxmint.com/mintMag/mintMag-001.pdf

And the Scribus source for it here:

http://www.linuxmint.com/mintMag.sla

We need people to:

- take responsibility for the project (editor in chief basically)
- write content on a monthly basis (interviews, tutorials, news..etc)

If you're interested in becoming part or leader of the mintMag sub-project don't hesitate to step forward. What you need is good writing skills, curiosity and interest in the project.

The Linux Mint Newsletter

We used to have a weekly newsletter and it used to be published in the wiki:

http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... Newsletter

This was time-consuming for me and as the distribution grew more and more it became harder to maintain. What we have now is a selection of blogs. Developers use the Linux Mint blog:

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog

And community blogs are gathered on the Linux Mint Planet:

http://www.linuxmint.com/planet

The Weekly Newsletter is still needed though because it summarizes all important events on a weekly basis, it makes it easier for people to know what's going on and it also gives us an increased presence outside of the Mint community (newsletters are used by the medias for instance).

We're looking for somebody to take over the Newsletter, summarize events from the forums, the blog, the planet on a weekly basis, add other content eventually and developer a mailing list as well as the wiki around this new Newsletter.

If you're interested in maintaining the newsletter please step forward. mintMag is all about montly content, this newsletter is all about weekly news.

mintCast

mintCast is the Linux Mint Podcast. Attempts were made to start this but it failed and nothing was done. We're looking for people to take over this project and create a podcast about Linux Mint and Linux in general.

This can be lead by a single person or by a team. You'll need to be able to record audio and publish the podcast on a regular basis. The format is entirely up to you.

You'll need good communications skills, good leadership (if you're working as a team on this) charisma and an interest in the project.

I don't know if it helps but a format was thought about by the previous team:

http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... nt_Podcast

--------------------------------------------

So, as you can see these three projects (PDF magazine, Weekly Newsletter, Audio Podcast) are all about communication. They would benefit our distribution greatly and we're looking for people from the community to step forward and take responsibility.

You don't need coding skills for these or even technical knowledge, this is all about communication, interest in Linux and Linux Mint and desire to get involved.

I hope people will come forward and join the team. We've got a wonderful community here, we should have wonderful community podcasts, magazines and newsletters to go with it.

Thank you,
Clem.

maty1206 · Post by **maty1206** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:44 pm

TO Clem:

I want to maintain the three projects, but as you can imagine, my English isn't excellent. So I will maintain in Spanish community those three projects together whit my partners, but in Spanish languages.

I would like to maintain The Linux Mint Newsletter in English language, but I will require an English speaker native guy who review my grammatical mistakes.

I'm afraid for mintMag , because I think that isn't recommendable to create a Spanish edition which is so different to English articles.

So, I think that if some English speaker guy takes this project, Spanish community edition could work together for develop the same articles in both languages.

Finally, mintCast in Spanish will start this week, team members are:

UPDATED
*gadi
*proxsy
*maty1206
(Verdegal37 is too busy, so I will look for someone who replace him)

We will use audacity for recording the articles and ogg vorbis codec to save the final product.

What do you think Clem?

maty1206 · Post by **maty1206** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 2:49 pm

catcher wrote:maty I'd be willing to look at the grammar for the Newsletter. I'd like to help in other ways but am too new to Linux and therefore Mint to be of real help on the other projects.

Excellent, I will start to elaborate the Newsletter this weekend.

I will send you a email whit the article.

Please, can you send me an PM whit your email?

Thanks a lot

Post by **clem** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 2:58 pm

By the way, don't be afraid of not finding enough content. As soon as you get started you'll find there's actually plenty to say every week/month and you won't be able to actually cover everything. The important challenges will be :

- To ensure a regular frequency of publication.
- For the leader of each project to manage to make others participate either as guests or as team partners.

Maty: This is great news! I still would like to see these carried on in English, but if you can make similar projects in Spanish, that's really good as well. I can't wait to listen to your first podcast guys.

Clem

red-e-made · Post by **red-e-made** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:43 pm

I worked as a journalist for a few years, and English is my native language, so I'd be very interested in journalistic work for mintMag - news, interviews and so on. Just PM me with more details.

rootkowski · Post by **rootkowski** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 4:20 am

Ede wrote:Sign me up for mintMag. I have great experience from producing stuff in Quark (On a professional basis), I'm sure I could use that knowledge in Scribus.

I also have alot of experience in interviewing and writing, and my english is fairly good, but somebody should go through everything I write just to be sure.

We could team up. I have experience of InDesign and have been trying to learn Scribus just with the purpose of making MintMag. I'm rather miserable when it comes to writing but I like working with layout, graphics and typography. With red-e-made we are already 3 interested in maintaining MintMag. That's a good start for a team

Post by **clem** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 4:28 am

I added a Community Projects section in the Development part of the forums. There's a subforum for each of these 3 projects, don't hesitate to use them to organize yourself into teams.

Clem

900i · Post by **900i** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 5:30 am

maty1206 wrote:TO Clem:

I would like to maintain The Linux Mint Newsletter in English language, but I will require an English speaker native guy who review my grammatical mistakes.

Count me in Maty, I can assist in proof reading your editorial masterpieces.

maty1206 · Post by **maty1206** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 12:31 pm

900i wrote:
maty1206 wrote:TO Clem:

I would like to maintain The Linux Mint Newsletter in English language, but I will require an English speaker native guy who review my grammatical mistakes.
Count me in Maty, I can assist in proof reading your editorial masterpieces.

Great and excellent. You're in!!!

Tonight I will organize the team and forum thread

Cheers

leo72 · Post by **leo72** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 1:05 pm

I would like to partecipate in mintMag but... english is not my native language so I should have someone who check my articles or.... maybe, what do you think about an italian traslation of the e-zine for italian users? Could this be an interesting project?

maty1206 · Post by **maty1206** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 8:34 pm

leo72 wrote:I would like to partecipate in mintMag but... english is not my native language so I should have someone who check my articles or.... maybe, what do you think about an italian traslation of the e-zine for italian users? Could this be an interesting project?

I think that Italian language is very interesting. I'm not englis native speaker, (I speak spanish), so 900i and catcher are going to review my articles translations to english.

If you want , you can do the same, first translate them to english and then , send us your work in .odt file and ourt partners will check the mistakes.

Cheers

leo72 · Post by **leo72** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:20 am

@Maty1206:
I could write some articles in english, no problem.
I would just like to know what kind of engagement is required...

maty1206 · Post by **maty1206** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 1:07 pm

leo72 wrote:@Maty1206:
I could write some articles in english, no problem.
I would just like to know what kind of engagement is required...

Hi Leo72!

Thanks for asking. Could be great if we speak about the new Mint release: Celena.

Why don't you write about mint tools?

Also you can write about your experience in Mint forum

Please give us your collaboration in this thread:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/index.php?f=121

Cheers