Proposing a Blog Post Process for our Writers

CHAOSS Community
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Hi!
We have been in need of a streamlined process that will enable and empower our technical writers in CHAOSS to contribute to our blog. We never really had a great process, and previously it included a mix between GitHub and Wordpress. To lower the barrier for contributing, today I proposed this in Slack:

  1. Author writes a post in Google Docs and sends a link to it in the #wg-communications channel on Slack
  2. 1 or 2 members review the post and offer comments/suggestions, and when the article is ready the author lets @Elizabeth know in the #wg-communications Slack channel
  3. If the author is new to the blog, @Elizabeth will create an account as an author on our WP site, will create a new post with the google doc, and publish it under the author’s name for proper attirbution.

This way, authors will only need to use Google Docs to write the article, and we can keep them from having to know GitHub or Wordpress.

I’m posting this here mostly for historical purposes, in case we ever wonder “why in the world are we doing it this way?” and to let folks know this is the new process. I’ll also add this to the Community Handbook and let the technical writing team know. A few folks have “signed off” on this process but if someone has questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to post here. :blush:

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We documented this here: Content Contribution - CHAOSS :tada:

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Hey there, Elizabeth, I’m Divya! I’m new here. I just have a few suggestions about the process you’ve summarised here. I do like the idea of moving away from GitHub or anything that requires special knowledge. However, from a review perspective, in the spirit of ensuring qualitative reviews, there’s a couple of things I’d like to suggest

  • While anybody should be able to review the post from the channel, there should be a subset of folks who can formally sign it off/okay it for publish.
  • While the spreadsheet is a fantastic way to track, I think we might soon run into the problem of it being untrackable when we scale this initiative out. For that reason, I believe, having a dedicated spreadsheet with tabs would be helpful.