Launch "This month in civic tech" email newsletter

openaustralia / oaf

OpenAustralia Foundation

https://github.com/openaustralia/oaf#readme

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Launch "This month in civic tech" email newsletter #173

Closed equivalentideas closed 9 years ago

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

This newsletter is a way to engage and support people interested in civic tech projects like those run by the OpenAustralia Foundation.

It should be published shortly before the OAF pub meetup so anything arising of interest can be discussed there.

It should be succinct and use headings/links to make any extended content scannable. People are smart and busy remember.

What should the scope of the newsletter be?

Support promising projects?
update people on OAF projects/events
discuss interesting examples?
link to relevant articles/videos etc. ?
all of the above?

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

As soon as we have an idea of what this will be about, let's make a signup for and send it out via twitter, the oa email list and do a blog post so people can sign up while we're getting things together.

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

A couple of examples of similar concepts:

The NiemanLab excellent/popular daly/weekly newsletter with links on the “future-of-news” http://www.niemanlab.org/subscribe/
Web Directions weekly newsletter feature design, development and ideas links, sometime around a topic, and often featuring promotions of WD upcoming events. There was a big applause for the newsletter at the Web Directions 2014 conference in Sydney: webdirections.org

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

I think the Thursday morning before the Pub Meet would be a good time to send out the email. That gives people coming the pub meet a few days and a weekend to find some time for a read, and for others it's a nice relaxed later in the week time so that it's in people minds for the weekend. Web Directions send out their weekly email on a Friday for example.

If that's when we want to send it out, then the first one will be the Thursday, 19th of February.

henare commented 9 years ago

If that's when we want to send it out, then the first one will be the Thursday, 19th of February.

:+1: SGTM!

henare commented 9 years ago

TODO as discussed with @equivalentideas:

[x] Decide on tool to collect and compile the newsletter: a new GitHub repo
[x] Create GitHub repo
[x] Develop design principles for and structure of the newsletter (document in repo)
[x] Set up MailChimp account
[x] add link to signup to blog
[x] Sign up people on the Google Group and tell them about it
[ ] create mail template

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

For the collection of links for the newsletter, here's the plan @henare and I are thinking:

Have a /newsletter repo, people can create issues with links they'd like to be included and we can then close them once added.

The content of the email can be a markdown document named for the date it will be sent. Once the content is finalised then generated HTML can be copied into a blog post and into the newsletter builder in mailchimp.

Nice things about having it in a repo:

we have clear space for information about the newsletter such as contributing guidelines
people can get involved if they like to let us know about things that should be included
it's all super transparent and backed up.

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

Here's the repo https://github.com/openaustralia/newsletter

equivalentideas commented 9 years ago

This is now all being handled on the openaustralia/newsletter repo. I'm closing this ticket.