[aspect-devel] ASPECT newsletter

[Rene Gassmoeller]

Thanks for the overwhelming feedback!

So far I would think the general vote would be:

1. To establish such a newsletter.
2. To keep it at a reasonable length.

There were mixed responses about the inclusion of issues and whether 
biweekly or monthly would be the correct interval, so I would go for the 
following solution:

Since a biweekly newsletter with only merged features might be short in 
many weeks, I would include the opened/closed discussions and send it at 
an two-weeks interval for now (unless it would be empty, there will be 
no report in case everybody is on vacation). The reasoning behind 
including the issues is that many bugs first appear there, and it is 
useful for everybody to know about them, even before they are fixed. 
Also this promotes the participation in these discussions ;-)

Lorraine, concerning the Wiki: I was more thinking of a "What has 
happened in the last time" information, and not of a "What should happen 
in the next time" information so a newsletter seems more reasonable for 
this purpose to me. However, the wiki is a great place for other 
information. E.g. we want to set up a list of systems on which ASPECT 
has been installed successfully (optionally including installation 
instructions and scaling information), so the Wiki would be a great 
place for that. To be honest, I was not aware that there is already a 
Wiki on the CIG website 
(https://wiki.geodynamics.org/software:aspect:start). Is this considered 
a community resource that can be extended by everybody? Somehow, I did 
not find a way to register myself as a user. Another option would be to 
start a wiki on Github (see for example 
https://github.com/dealii/dealii/wiki), which would allow everybody with 
a Github account (so most of us) to join in writing. We should try to 
decide on a place, but then it is certainly a community decision what to 
put in the wiki and what to put in github issues.

Everybody stay tuned for the newsletter, which might arrive later this 
week or next week.

Best,
Rene

>> On Feb 21, 2016, at 3:07 PM, Rene Gassmoeller <rene.gassmoeller at mailbox.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone!
>>
>> We are currently considering implementing an automated regular (biweekly
>> or monthly) newsletter that summarizes the latest developments inside of
>> ASPECT and would like to ask for your opinion on this issue.
>> The reasoning behind this idea is that most of the "developer" talk
>> about new features has moved to the Github platform
>> (https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect), but Github offers no option of
>> only receiving a summary email, you either get only emails mentioning
>> you, or you get all about ASPECT - possibly a hundred per week in busy
>> weeks.
>> On the other hand only reading the changelog
>> (https://aspect.dealii.org/doc/doxygen/changes_current.html) for every
>> new release every 6 months or so keeps you out of the loop for a long time.
>>
>> We are aware that you might already get a bunch of newsletters and we do
>> not want to spam this mailing list, so I would like to ask for opinions
>> on the following questions:
>>
>> 1. Would you consider such newsletters spam, or would you feel it makes
>> your life easier following the development of ASPECT?
>> 2. Would you prefer a monthly or biweekly interval?
>> 3. Are you only interested in merged features (pull requests) or are you
>> also interested in a list of recently opened/finished discussions
>> (issues) to keep up-to-date with bug reports, feature requests, and so on?
>>
>> I have posted an example for such a newsletter below, so that you can
>> get a feeling for how it would look like.
>>
>> Let me know what you think about this idea (otherwise I will try to make
>> a best guess :-)),
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Rene
>>
>>
>>
>> Hello everyone!
>>
>> This is the biweekly ASPECT newsletter.
>> Below you find a list of recently merged features and links to the discussions about them:
>>
>> #758 Indent #include statements inside #ifdef...#endif. https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/758
>> #753 Rename parameters https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/753
>> #752 Visualization improvements https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/752
>> #750 Postprocessor for executing shell commands. https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/750
>> #748 Use mapping for output interpolation https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/748
>> #747 Use static_cast<int> inside each call to std::abs() in gplates.cc https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/747
>> #661 Implement interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for temperature field. https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect/pull/661
>>
>>
>> Thanks for being part of the community!
>>
>> Let us know about questions, problems, bugs or just share your experience by writing to aspect-devel at geodynamics.org, or by opening issues or pull requests at https://www.github.com/geodynamics/aspect.
>>
>> Additional information can be found at https://aspect.dealii.org/, https://geodynamics.org/cig/software/aspect/, and https://github.com/geodynamics/aspect.
>>
>>
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