Re: news ticker Services Policy -- time for a change?

First off - Stephen took too much credit for sparking this discussion - I approved the entry for postgresql.org (he did -announce)

While abiding by the current policy (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/NewsEventsApproval) I did thoroughly research what 2ndQuadrant was offering and why it would be worthwhile to have as news on our homepage. My conclusion was that they service was well-defined and different from past well-defined service offerings and thus could be approved.

Rest of my responses inline:

On Jun 14, 2013, at 8:55 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/13/2013 06:49 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
>>>
>>> * Josh Berkus (josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com) wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> Thing is, I don't think that kind of announcement
>>>> belongs on the postgresql.org home page.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure that I agree. For one thing, it helps argue
>>> against the "there's no commercial support for OSS!" mentality which
>>> still exists in some industries (particularly US government).
>>
>>
>> I haven't heard this argument in a very long time and considering I have
>> various governments constantly asking me to fill out RFPs (you can have them
>> 2ndQuadrant/EDB, RFPs are the suck) I am not inclined to agree with your
>> statement.
>
> FWIW, I hear it all the time.
>
> Not from people who are clued in, but there are a *lot* of people who
> are not clued in.

I've also heard this argument quite a bit in the past year. But on top of this, it gives us a one-click avenue from the homepage to demonstrate to professional Postgres users that there is a professional community to support them if they run into issues and the like. Yes, we do have the "Support" pages but they are becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate through as more companies become listed (which I believe could open up another discussion).

At the end of the day, we do want .org to help drive adoption. Which begs the question - if a company offers a well-defined, community Postgres-specific service offering (e.g. a SLA, ad hoc feature development, etc.), is it announcement worthy?

>> Should the announcement be on the front page. I don't know. Part of me says,
>> "well of course". They are a major postgresql contributor after all.
>
> I say "probably". Not because they are a major postgresql contributor,
> but because it's a service that would be interesting to a fair number
> of PostgreSQL users. Certainly more than most of the other news on
> that page are interesting to.

+1 - this is the first news item I've approved in awhile that is directly related to community Postgres

>> The other part of me, and problem the bigger part says, "Absolutely not".
>> Why? Because it isn't PostgreSQL news. It is 2ndQuadrant news. Maybe it
>> belongs on -announce but it definitely doesn't belong on .Org news.
>
> I'm sure any marketeer would love you for saying that. Getting
> something approved for posting to -announce is *significantly* more
> valuable than getting it onto the frontpage, given that it gets
> delivered to more than 10,000 confirmed email addresses.
>
> We do need to align these moderation policies. I've done some work on
> a technical fix for this, but it's not ready yet.

Would be happy to discuss and review such a patch - as someone who posts news/events from time to time, it is tedious to go to two places.

> Another thing that repeatedly comes up in discussions like this is to
> separate "community news" from "commercial news", which I think in
> general would be a good thing (and have both of them on the
> frontpage, in different sections, so commercial news doesn't push
> community news off the page). That comes back to the definition of
> community news though - what about pgadmin, pgsql-jdbc? then what
> about ruby drivers? or support in CMS xyz (open source)? etc. But if
> we can make an actual definition that *works* for that, I still think
> that would be a better idea.

Might be worth it to create a news tagging system and then let users decide which stories they want to see. That way we keep one news pipeline and users can set up their own filters.

Jonathan