After three years of hard work the chairman of the openSUSE Weekly News team, Sascha Manns has given up his chair. We have recieved many questions about the future of the Weekly News so we thought to write a little bit about this topic.

Why we need the openSUSE Weekly News? The Weekly News team published it’s first issue in November 2007. The goal of the team is to reflect what happened in the last week inside and around the openSUSE project, as no one can read all the articles about every topic. So the team collects and organizes news in a collaboratively way. **

Why do we need a chairman?

The hard truth is that we need someone who wants to invest a lot of time. You have to collect and read a lot of RSS feeds, tweets, facebook and Google+ posts and decide which is important for the readers. It’s also good to be online in IRC and IMs, so people can point you to intersting news. Every week you have to ”freeze” the weekly news draft, give it a proofreading session and publish it. There are also others tasks such as posting a weekly reminder mail to some mailing lists, publishing a post here on news etc. All in all it’s a lot of work that needs coordination. **

What are the technical details of producing the Weekly News?

**Sascha used docbook/xml to produce the Weekly News. The docbook language is used to describe content and can provide many output formats like epub, pdf or HTML. In the past we also had local teams who translated the newsletter into other languages. And we’re hoping that we can have it again. A challenge here is that most content in the original Weekly News comes from sources in English, so one of the important things for local teams is to collect and prepare links to content in their own language. It’s not merely a translation job.

How can you help?

If you are interested to produce the Weekly News send an e-mail to: opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org