# Member/Committer newsletter

## Problem statement

Members (and, even moreso, committers) are less engaged with the larger foundation than ever. And the members list is a firehose, so telling people "just read members@" is both dismissive and ineffective.

Meanwhile, there is critical information that we need our members to have (and a slightly smaller set of information that we need our committers to have) to be better community citizens, and to do their basic duty as members of the corporation.

We need ways to deliver this information quickly, without the overhead of digging through a dozen philosophical threads. At the same time, greater engagement will, over time, lead to greater concern about the Foundation as a whole, which will lead some of these individuals to engage in those philosophical conversations that are critical to maintaining our mission.

## Idea

A Monthly newsletter to be delivered to [e-mail] and [e-mail] Possibly tooling to deliver two different versions, with member-confidential items removed from committers version.

Content should be as brief as possible, with links to further details. It should be only critical information, not long-form articles, or opinion pieces. However, we should have a resources section where those longer-form pieces could be displayed.

The goal is to engage without overwhelming with Yet Another Thing that people have to read.

We are also specifically *not* competing with the Weekly Roundup content, produced by Sally and Swapnil for an external audience.

## Name

Suggestions:

* Monthly Member Moment
* Critical Committer Communication

## Tooling

Intake form for item suggestions. Can be a link to a longer article? We could start this as a simple Google Form, and evolve from there

Human step to review and edit before sending.

Edit/approve stage should be accessible to an entire content committee, so that this is not a one-person show.

## Timing

I propose a monthly delivery, to start. Since the Board meeting is traditionally on the Third Wednesday of the month, I recommend targeting the Second Tuesday of the month for delivery of the newsletter. (Science says Tuesday > Monday, and a week notice is optimized for short/limited attention.)

This, in turn, requires that the content be drafted at least a week before that, for approval purposes (See Challenges section below)

## Standard sections

Consistent items in newsletter would be:

* Announce next Board meeting (Members only)
* Reference minutes from previous meeting
* Upcoming members meeting (Members only)
* Encourage members to nominate non-Member participants on their projects
* Basic details of attendance
* Upcoming events/conferences
* Link to Swapnil/Sally's weekly roundups
* *Limited to one a month*: Specific tip on how to be a more engaged member of the community. eg Growth/ComDev opportunities (Feathercast, useful resources)

## Challenges

Please list objections/challenges here

* We need approval of M&P for content sent to committers@ As such, we would need to provide a draft of each mailing ahead of time. This also assumed that M&P doesn't shoot down this idean entirely.
* Similarly, we would need approval to send to members-notify@ since that is specifically intended to be a MANDATORY subscription, and, as such, we don't want to burden it with additional content.
* We could, on the other hand, create YAML (Yet Another Mailing List) so that we have opt-in and thus more freedom with content. members-newsletter@ and committers-newsletter@ This would at least partially undermine the purpose - viz: reaching all members. But it would also ensure that our audience *wants* to receive this information.

## To Do

* Draft proposal to membership, collect feedback
* Request permission to send to members-notify and committers list
* Identify participants
* Do we want to conduct planning on dev@community (for higher visibility) or on a newsletter-dev mailing list (for sharper focus)?
* Write a sample newsletter which would be included in the proposal to the membership [LINK](https://hackmd.io/0eeIQ7wDQnKr-LAgN6QqLA)

###### tags: `apache` `newsletter`