Publicizing MacPorts

[Rainer Müller]

On 20/04/2021 12.40, Steven Smith wrote:
> That’s begging the question of an effective communications strategy. A distributed model of random volunteers is perfect for aggregating git commits. It’s highly ineffective at communicating important news from that organization.
> 
> If MacPorts wants to communicate better, it must post important announcements like “MacPorts supports the new Apple silicon M1” at a MacPorts website, and someone with a macports.org address must send emails to a few tech reporters that say “look at this please.”

If you pledge to handle this kind of marketing, I would have no problem to hand 
out an @macports.org address for that. By the way, having our own mail domain is 
not that common for open source projects. Most projects hosted on services such 
as GitHub/GitLab/etc. will never have that. I really do not think it is of that 
much significance.

>> We would be grateful if more users/contributors could join the boat
>> and actively help in areas where they feel that they could contribute
>> to the project (in one way or another).
> 
> That’s precisely why a more effective and realistic commutations strategy is desirable.

I don't disagree. But it needs at least one person invested enough to start it 
and then some more to follow-through with it.

>> If someone is willing to step up and write blog posts, articles
>> (potentially based on a few rounds of questions/answers/document
>> revisions), etc., that would certainly be more than welcome.
> 
> I’d wager that many people would write these, but the channel and infrastructure for this do not now exist: no MacPorts News/Announcements page, no blog page, a somnambulant Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/macports, and no peer review control mechanism. This can be accomplished by providing such tools to divide-and-conquer, with an open peer review mechanism for contributors without commit authority.

We have the news section on the website [1]. Posts can be submitted with pull 
requests to the corresponding repository [2]. At the moment, it is only in use 
for release announcements that are also posted on macports-announce [3]. I don't 
think anyone would object against posting more.

I know the Twitter account is not as active as it could be. I personally do not 
find the time to post there regularly. I can grant you access to the account 
through TweetDeck if you want to make it more active. There is a list of people 
with access on the SocialMedia wiki page [4]. Currently the only rule is that 
tweets should have a signature by their author.

As you can see, some infrastructure exists. It needs community members to step 
up and provide content to fill these channels.

Rainer

[1] https://www.macports.org/news/
[2] https://github.com/macports/macports.github.io
[3] https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-announce/
[4] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SocialMedia