Communication guidelines
To communicate with and reach a wide audience, we use the following channels
- this website, for documentation
- the email discussion list, for interactions among users to help each other out
- GitHub, for interaction between developpers
- Mastodon, for release announcements and news items
With each of these we reach out to a specific group FieldTrip stakeholders but - although they are partially overlapping - there is none through which we reach everyone.
News items and releases
These are to be announced on the website and on Mastodon.
To add a news item to the website, please file a pull request adding a new file to the _posts folder on the website. See example files there for how these (markdown) files should be structured. The latest files flagged as categories: [news] will, when merged, appear on the homepage.
Whenever a new release is made following automatic code testing, a news item is automatically made that is flagged as categories: [release] in the header, and sent as pull request to the website repository. This PR has to be reviewed and summarized for human readability by one of the website editors. If merged, the “latest release” section on the homepage will automatically be updated to reflect this.
All news items (both “manually created” and those corresponding to new releases) can contain a tweet element in the header. This can contain up to 280 characters for the tweet/toot that is automatically sent once the news item is merged with the website repository. At that moment the news item appears on the website, and a tweet/toot is sent out.
If you only want to send a tweet/toot, you can make a news item without either news or release as category in the page header (or without any categories line at all), but with a tweet in the header. Idem for a news item for the website without a tweet: just leave out the tweet in the page header and only add the relevant category.
Code changes and commits
People that are interested in following the details of the development can follow these on their own initiative on GitHub by “watching” the fieldtrip/fieldtrip or fieldtrip/website repository.