Changes to blog working practices

[sftim]

[2025-01-09 Zoom discussion]

• We already have docs on contributing to the blog team, but it's hard to go from not-in-the-blog-team to feeling comfortable about reviewing and scheduling articles

• what can we do about that?

• we could use a guide for would-be authors, too
  we don't have a good guide on how to write a blog article and the "fit" of a blog for kubernetes.io

  • maybe if we added an evergreen blog article!
  • A key part of a guide for authors (and reviewers) is they what we don't want to publish. Write this first.

• maybe there are different roles

  • eg scheduling and coordination
  • eg content / editorial review
  • eg outreach to potential authors
  • maybe a separate mentor / coach role?

• People don't understand the blog work with SIG Docs and the work from Contributor Comms with SIG ContribEx
  This is about how https://k8s.io/blog is not the same as https://k8s.dev/blog/

  • Could we run one team across the two sites?
    • "The blogs team"?
      ie, that the same people would have same permissions to both https://k8s.io/blog and https://k8s.dev/blog/ (at least, from their membership of that team).
      People could of course be in unrelated teams as well.
    • Set up WG Blog formally?

• Idea: blog team approvers can formally sign off PRs that have had a separate review, whether or not the first review is done by an org member or not.

• Can we run a cohort through onboarding?
  This would be something like https://www.k8s.dev/community/mentoring/, aimed at building a larger blog team

  • If we have a cohort, we could identify (future) lead / key contributors. Per activity?
    • subproject lead (?)
    • scheduling and content lead (?)
    • content editor - where other people doing editorial work are “subeditors“ (?)
    • outreach lead (?)
  • is the cohort a one-time thing or will there be a cadence
  • Do we want shadow roles? If so, which roles?

• How do we make [showing up and sticking around] rewarding for people?
  Contributing to the blog team doesn't have to have a goal of moving along the contributor ladder
  Contributing to the blog team doesn't have to have a goal of writing any blog articles

• A challenge: giving people the confidence to try reviewing, and maybe make a mistake when they do, and that's OK?

  • How do we help people get good enough that they are confident in themselves?

• Let's aim to explain what evergreen blog articles are.

We want to encourage folks to contribute to blogs even when then don't want to write blogs.
How about we blog about some of these challenges?

"build sustainability into the blog team"

[sftim]

💭 Idea: maybe have blog authors also review others' blogs
…before we publish a blog article, have the author review a different blog that's awaiting approval
(we can merge articles as draft pending that final signoff)

Supporting work item: in the blog contributing/reviewing guide, emphasize the what is not allowed

Then there's a feedback loop where people might tweak their own article having reviewed another; encouraging overall quality.
We'd have a framework to add to the contributing / reviewing a blog guide on the blog author / reviewer feedback loop

We also want to build a feed / set / cohort of people comfortable with reviewing the content side of release comms articles

[sftim]

We have an existing idea for a community manager.

[nate-double-u]

💭 Idea: maybe have blog authors also review others' blogs
…before we publish a blog article, have the author review a different blog that's awaiting approval
(we can merge articles as draft pending that final signoff)

I really like this idea. It reminds me of reviewing papers back in college; if you submitted a paper, you were put in a pool to review other papers you may be qualified to review. It also targets community folks interested in making the blog a success (otherwise, why would they be submitting a post) and inviting them to help in its success.

[sftim]

I've tried it a bit and it seems to be getting traction.