Publicizing MacPorts

[Steven Smith]

> If you pledge to handle this kind of marketing, I would have no problem to hand out an @macports.org address for that.

Thank you for the confidence. There are posts I could and would write about the utility specific ports that are only available from MacPorts. But I’m honestly not the right person to get out the high-level, timely, and accurate announcements of the sort we’ve been discussing. 

There’s been a few good ideas in this thread that stand out to include in a feed:
• High-level, timely, and accurate announcements, .e.g. “MacPorts supports the new Apple silicon M1”
• Blog posts about capabilities, e.g. “here’s a useful port you may want to know about,” or “here’s a useful port command.”
• Noteworthy and insightful statistics, e.g. total number of ports, total number of compiled binaries, total number supported on Apple silicon, total supported on Big Sur, total supported on Tiger, Big Ten list of popularity, the port with the longest dependency chain—stuff like that, reduced to a dashboard. 
• Calls for MacPorts meetings, summer of code recruiting, and other calendar events.

> 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].

Some feedback:

If the News section is intended to include other items like this listed above, then that must be made clear to the user community on this page and on GitHub. Right now, contributed content is the exclusive domain of the top MacPorts managers: https://github.com/macports/macports.github.io/commits/master

I looked at the README.md for [2], and honestly don’t have a clear idea of where to start to submit new content, either basic HTML or HTML plus images. I must launch a localhost jekyll server? This looks like a high hurdle. How would I contribute content about a specific port?


> On Apr 20, 2021, at 15:03, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
> 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