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

Welcome to the SoylentNews.org Wiki.

We deliver community-sourced news and discussion. This is a grassroots effort powered by article submissions from our readers, volunteers, and our forked version of slashcode. We highlight 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 anonymous discourse as there's no mandatory registration needed to comment.

We are mindful of community sentiment, and will not bend to overreaching corporate agenda. The goal is to be an excellent source for discussion and news about technology, art, science and politics.

Though the site is young and there are bugs, we are improving and adapting to satisfy the community's needs. We look forward to pushing the boundaries of web experience and are committed to involving the community on all major decisions.

Project and business information

• Some information on Proposed Business Model
  
• Our Business Planning
  
• Our Feature List
• Staff Meeting Logs
• System Administration

Get Involved

This project is run entirely by the community and there are many different facets. Here are some of the many ways to participate:

• Submit a Story
• Volunteer
  • Get in touch with the Development Team
  • Reach out to one of the other Teams
  • Contact the relevant person: Who's Who?
• Hop in to IRC:
  • #soylent on irc.soylentnews.org/6697
  • Webchat
  • IRC Wiki Page
• Bugs and Features:
  • Submit a bug or Feature Request
  • Add a Suggestion - larger projects to tackle for the future
• Tell Somebody A friend, a colleague, any major news source....
  • Do what you can to get the word out
  • You could participate in The Slashcott

Contacts

A list of people working on this project:

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
• 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
• Story Style

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" and Mailing list Archive

These are communications surrounding the initial launch:

• An archive of updates surrounding initial work and launch can be found at Updates
• Mailing list update Messages are here