Your Kernel Cousins GNUe needs you!

[Peter Sullivan]

It's become obvious to me over the past few weeks that I have been
struggling to keep Kernel Cousins GNUe ticking along at the level
I have been used to. This is due to a combination of factors, many
of which are actually fairly positive:
a) Increased activity on the project as a whole, with more people
involved and more things to cover.
b) The mailing lists actually springing into life a bit more,
allowing people who can't or don't hang around in IRC all the time
to contribute as well.
c) Me getting involved in other aspects of GNUe (e.g. the website)
that take up some KC-ing time.
d) After a fairly quiet year at work, which has allowed me to do
my contracted hours and not much more, things will be busier in
the new year as we implement a new (sadly non-free) ERP system.

However, I feel/hope that the GNUe community finds Kernel Cousins
a useful resource, and I am keen to maintain it at its current
comprehensive level if at all possible. The obvious solution
(and one which other KCs have used in the past) is for KC GNUe
to go group-authored.

If we could assemble a team of, say, 4-5 people who could
summarise 4-5 threads a week, along with a few other people
who could do a thread a week when they had time, this would
reduce the pressure on me so that I could clear up the rest,
even allowing for the extra time for me in bringing everyone
else's contributions together.

To put this in perspective, a 35-thread cousin probably takes
me about 20 hours to write, so each thread is about 0.5 hour's
work on average - although there's a very wide range.

I've had some initial thoughts about the mechanics of this
(other group-authored KCs have worked on the basis of
"claiming" mailing list threads as they finish, which
obviously needs amending somewhat for IRC), but before I
set anything up, I wanted to see what the level of interest
was.

If you would be willing to commit to doing a certain number
of KC summaries (whether one a day, one a week or whatever),
please let me know. If I get a reasonable response, I'll then
get all the mechanics discussed and sorted out. In the
meantime, if you want to read about what's involved, there's
some information on the Kernel Traffic site:
* Thread Summary FAQ: http://kt.zork.net/summaryfaq.html
* KC Authorship FAQ:  http://kt.zork.net/author.html
* IRC Summary FAQ:    http://kt.zork.net/irc.html

If there's no interest, it won't mean the end of KC GNUe -
I would continue to do it, but I would have to cover things
on a more summarised basis ("people said stuff, many
netsplits occoured, there was much trout-slapping") and even
miss days out completely when under time pressure. I believe
this would make KC GNUe less useful to the community, and
would prefer to avoid this if possible.

--
Peter Sullivan <address@hidden>