Planet Ergo

My blog is now included on Fedora's "Planet Edited" - mind you various people won't like me for calling it censored. Originally, I thought the censored version of planet was going to filter out the 'I had this-and-that for breakfast' type of blog posts, which, usually anyway, have nothing to do with Fedora at all. However, after some clarification from Andrea Veri, it seems a relation between the posts content and Fedora isn't sufficient - the blog post must be specifically about Fedora.

I suppose what this will result in is a series of blog posts from team leaders and whatever other semi-official titles you can attach to the wide variety of Ninjas within the Fedora Project. Speculating about content, I can think of announcements, progress reports, invititations to attend meetings either in person or virtually, but also; event reports from our Ambassadors, speculation on pre-mature ideas and concepts, and blog posts like this one, from... let's call'em "opinion-makers" shall we?

I think that's great. It's censored, as technical posts like my post on noop I/O schedulers in KVM environments through Puppet and Augeas apparently do not seem to fit the filter "about Fedora" though I think they are related to Fedora or at the very least interesting to some small amount of Fedora people. However, as I've said, my misunderstanding of what the censored version of planet was about was clarified.

Ultimately, Planet Edited is what our dear self-regulating community should want from the original planet - but without the censorship. Somehow people on the original planet are unable to, forget or refuse to show constraint in what they'll make end up on the Fedora Planet... they omit the appropriate tagging or include an all inclusive feed on Planet. I'm one of those people including their entire blog on planet, but then again bits and bytes in Free Software is about all I live and breath for.

Let's not forget it is planet.fedoraproject.org that now has a moderated version to achieve the exact same measure of control over content, but top-down. It's supposed to work the other way around... anyone of us should show constraint pushing something out to planet, asking "Is this what I would like to see others post to planet?" - bearing in mind I lose it every once in a while, too. Now though, Planet Edited is going to make people feel excluded, not necessarily a positive influence on anyone's gut feeling. The people with their blog included in the edited version of Planet -like me- are now on some sort of virtual pedestal, with more exposure to the general audience - also the electorate. I think the moderated version of our planet is restrictive, divisive and exclusive, whereas I would want our community to be more inclusive - and yes that includes girl scouts.