SoylentNews

This is a home for information about how SoylentNews.org was started, the vision for it, and discussion about it's future.

About SoylentNews.org

Greetings soylentils! And welcome to the SoylentNews Wiki!

We deliver the best community-sourced news for nerds. This is a grassroots effort powered by article submissions from our readers; we draw attention to those stories on the web which are important to everyone - especially nerds. We also provide a soapbox for discussion moderated by the site's patrons, and allow the community to speak anonymously; there is no mandatory registration to comment.

We are mindful of community sentiment, and will not bend to overreaching corporate agenda. We want to be your source for news about technology, art, science and politics.

We are the new kid on the block and are adapting quickly to satisfy our community's needs. We look forward to exceeding your expectations and pushing the boundaries of web experience. And we will make no changes without community support.

To everyone involved... THANK YOU!

Project and business information

• Some information on Proposed Business Model
  
• Our Business Planning
  
• Our Expense Report
• Our Feature List
• Staff Meeting Logs

Get Involved

Hop in to IRC: - IRC: #soylent on irc.soylentnews.org/6697 (Webchat).

Volunteer - Reach out to us: admin+volunteer@soylentnews.org

Work on an open project

• Pick a project from the Open Projects list
• Contact the relevant Overlord for more information ( Who's Who?)

Check out the TodoList

Add a Suggestion

Register on the forums - http://forums.SoylentNews.org (note: the forums may be scrapped)

• Go to forums.SoylentNews.org and register a user
• Read this post if you are having problems. (Thanks MrGuy)
• Add yourself to whichever groups you are interested in
• For tech issues with the forum software, please Email Joel: soylent (at) finite (dot) ms

Tell Somebody A friend, a colleague, any major news source....

• Do what you can to get the word out
• Also you could participate in The Slashcott

Contacts

All Contact and Overlord info can be found here:

List of Discussion Pages

• NewName
• MailingListUpdates
• Finances -- which model would allow to minimise and/or distribute hosting costs
• Business
• Moderation -- how/if to enhance; was it so bad it was the primary reason for the diaspora?
• FeatureList -- discussion of required/desired characteristics
• Submission guidelines
• Content
• Development
• Style
• Migration of users from Slashdot -- how to handle Nicks and UIDs
• Licensing
• WhosWho -- points of contact in different project areas
• Spreading the word
• Comments
• To do
• Bugs
• Stories from former Slashdot users
• What should the IRC network be like?
• How do we want a URL shortener to be used?
• CssWork
• The Slashcott

Site Name

We have a temporary name!

Thanks go out to everyone who made suggestions - some of them were absolutely brilliant! For example, it hadn't occurred to me to choose a name based on a non-English word, or a palindrome, or a puzzle. Many of the entries were quite clever. (Adies, it took me more than a day to figure yours out. Bravo!)

I won't post the runners up because squatters might take the names before we hold the real contest. We'll figure out a way to prevent this somehow - at worst case we can choose judges and do it privately.

Jerry had the winning entry.

The temp name is: SoylentNews with the tagline: SoylentNews is people!

Does this rock? It hits the trifecta of website goodness:

• Descriptive in a way that mundanes will understand (compare "Photoshop" with "GIMP", "Internet Explorer" with "Firefox", and "MediaPlayer" with "VLC")

• It's part of Nerd culture, a pun, and slightly twisted

• It's suggestive of being community driven

• Possible Trademark issues

• It is attached to some movie about eating corpses and implies "News fresh as processed corpses" (??)

This will be a hard act to beat. Start thinking up names for the contest, or throw your weight behind this one. The contest will be held soon after we open the doors.

(And it was poutine (from IRC) who suggested we use a temporary name. Others may also have suggested it, but it was his post that I noticed. Be sure to thank him if you see him on IRC.)

Similar Projects

• Technocrat - News site presented by Bruce Perens, going on the air Tuesday February 17.
• Pipedot - Rewrite project - Aiming to create a cleaner news site with modern technology.
• Usenet newsgroup comp.misc - on Google Groups, on Squte, via newsreader application

Updates Archive

An archive of updates surrounding initial work and launch can be found at Updates