On Wed, 2019-08-07 at 11:05 -0400, Rich Bowen wrote:

Hi, folks,

I don't know who, if anyone, is still on this list. It would be great to hear from you all, and what your interest is in this list.

Over the last few months, I've been swamped with all manner of things, and the blog, and social media, has suffered as a result. You may have noticed.

I need help in keeping these things alive, and filled with useful, non-spammy, content. I'm hoping that either someone here, or someone we can get to join us here, can step up and help make that happen.

Places where I need help:

• Monthly newsletter. I'm drafting this right now. I'm only a day

behind schedule at this point, but having a way to do a running draft all month, and publishing it when it's due, rather than the last-minute scramble, would be awesome.

• Monthly newsletter translation. Over the years we have provided

the newsletter in a variety of languages. Having some consistency on this would be great.

• Twitter. Daily tweets about what's happening in the SIGs important

topics on the mailing list, event promotion, would be great.

• Facebook. Our facebook page is already pretty active, but an awful

lot of it is spammy. Having *quality* content there, daily, would be a huge improvement.

• Blog. Useful, technical articles, weekly, would be awesome. But

this needs someone to go looking for that content, getting people to write it, running a schedule so that we have regular content. We have a LOT of people who, I think, could write these articles, if we go about it well.

Hi Rich,

I will be the first to reply to list and show there is at least some life here.

If you would like any assistance, I am happy to help. My contribution is from fedora up to EL, with EL being my primary OS.

One great drawback of CentOS is the way it has gone from a community project through back door negotiation to being very internal of Red Hat, or the perception of that. An open culture and clear direction needs to be once more cultivated, an elected leadership that all developers/users know the points of contact and of the projects present and future goals. Communication has been very lacking for some time and this needs to change for the project to survive and flourish.

CentOS has for some time concentrated on the cloud (narrowed scope) and the workstation/desktop and other user has been forgotten. It would be advantageous to be promoting these and other areas.

CentOS maybe Enterprise Linux. However, as a volunteer who also teaches basic computing skills[1] at a Housing Association Training Centre, we as professionals in the most part set the bar far too high and exclude people. This in many cases is not intentionally, but in some cases it is. We I would hope want to once again bring CentOS to the masses and promote the fact this can be your stable and secure long term daily OS for man, woman and child. It is here we can create more content for the novice right through to the IT professional and make the project once again relevant and useful for a greater audience.

If anyone wishes to discuss further, I am more than happy to oblige.

Regards

Phil

[1] Horton Housing - Basic computer skills. From turning a device on, parts of a computer/device and basic software use.