The Community Fund sponsorship of the monthly news & accompanying social media posts has come to an end. After discussing the continuation of a similar proposal, the consensus within the community seems to favour focusing my time more on helping to clear the backlog of pending pull requests and working on new features for NavCoin Core.

Not thinking it wise to completely abandon the monthly newsletter and social accounts i have tried to come forward with a way compromise to keep the wheels moving while I focus on development.

Federating the Monthly News

Since NavCoin is a community driven project, it makes some sense to make the monthly newsletter is a federated publication based on user submissions.

This means it is each community members responsibility when you have some news to share about progress in your NavCoin project, an exchange listing you’ve helped secure, the community fund / payment proposal you’ve submitted, the youtube video you’ve made, the article you’ve written or anything you’ve contributed to the NavCoin project, you would submit a brief write up here which will then appear in the next monthly newsletter.

This will mean that instead of having to research and write the entire newsletter, I will be simply compiling the submissions, adding my own section about what I have completed and circulating it through our channels.

I will also cease publishing the Community Roundtable write up, so if you want to keep up with the roundtables, you’ll need to join our Discord.

The deadline for submissions is the third Tuesday of every month with the newsletter being published on the third Wednesday of every month and syndicated through all of our social channels, mailing lists and websites.

To submit something for the monthly news, simply fill out this Google form.

Automating Social Media Posts

At the request of the community I opened some public Trello boards which we have setup so the community can contribute to the posts which appear on NavCoin’s Twitter & Facebook.

On the social posts board, I had been building up a library of recyclable content that was used to ensure we had social posts going out every day even when there was no tailored content to post. I have taken this concept one step further and actually automated the posting of these recyclable posts.

This bot will read the Trello board and use Buffer to schedule the top social post to twitter and facebook every day then move the Trello card to the bottom of the list. As well as cycling through this content, the bot will also post to Twitter & Facebook every time a pull request is opened, closed, reopened or merged on the NavCoin Core Repository.

I will still be posting some tailored content and look to further build on this bots capabilities to perhaps report on more NavCoin related GitHub projects or post scheduled reminders about upcoming monthly Developer & Community Roundtables.

Again, this is really supposed to be a federated process, so if you want to participate and add posts to the library of recycled content or write tailored content for NavCoin about your efforts, please join us on discord and ask to be added to the public Trello board.

Community Engagement

With both of these measures in place, it should free me up considerably to get another day or two per week of work done on NavCoin Core. It really is time consuming keeping all these things running and I have a lot of responsibilities in this project which take priority over curating social media content.

The outcome of these efforts will be as good as the effort the community puts into it, so it will be up to everyone to participate.

Of course, I am not the only one capable of writing a community newsletter or social posts, so if you’re reading this and you want to get involved with writing for our medium publication or social channels, get in touch!

— proletesseract