syndic8.com - this is how the evangelism process will work...

["Jeff Barr" <jeff@vertexdev.com>]

Hi Everyone,

I've just added a new picture to the Syndic8.com site:

	http://www.syndic8.com/evangelism.php

Although this is a fairly simple picture, I've put quite a
bit of thought into it and to the processes behind it. I am
still wrestling with the whole "points" model. Treat the
actual numeric values as relative, rather than absolute.

Here's the concept:

1. There will be two text boxes at a prominent point on the
   site. One will accept an URL of a site that someone 
   would like to see syndicated (e.g. www.cnn.com). The other
   will accept the URL of a syndicated feed (e.g. 
   www.cnn.com/rss.xml). These text boxes will work whether
   or not you are logged in. If you are logged in, you will
   accumulate points -- 1 point for a site name, and 2
   points for an URL to a syndicated feed. These must be
   valid and unique for the points to be applied. Each of
   these boxes will accept any number of URLs at a time.
   Site URLs will be entered into the feeds database with
   a state of "D" - someone Desires that the site be 
   syndicated. Feed URLs will get a state of "P" - the site's
   existence and quality are to be Polled.

2. The Polling process will make several attempts to access
   all URLs in state "P" over the course of a day or so. 
   Those which respond successfully at least 75% of the
   time will move to state "A"; they must be Approved in
   order to become full-fledged feeds. Response time,
   parsability of XML, and headlines will be collected.

3. When you log in, if you have elected to take upon the
   roles of Reviewer or Evangelist (you will be able to 
   do this in your user profile), you will see a list of
   feeds that are in states "A" and "D", respectively. If
   you take on the role of Scraper, you will see feeds 
   that are in state "W".

   If you are a Reviewer, you can examine the info known
   about the site. You will see its responsiveness and
   a measure of its story flow (units TBD). You will see
   a bunch of headlines from the site. You then have to
   make an important decision -- do we want the feed in
   the master list? We'll need some review guidelines. I'm
   open to taking anything that is of good to great quality,
   and which does not promote racism, narrowmindedness, or
   things which are illegal or immoral. If you approve a
   site, it moves to state "S", because it is Syndicated.
   And you get 10 points for the work that you did. If
   you decline, it moves to state "R" since we Rejected it.
   You still get your 10 points.

   If you are an Evangelist, you will see the list of
   sites in state "D". If you choose to be the site's
   Evangelist, you indicate that, and the site then moves
   to state "E", because its being Evangelized. It is 
   then up to you to find the right person at the site,
   tell them why and how they want to syndicate, and to
   followup on this regularly until they agree to do it,
   or decline. You can also offer scraping services; if
   they want this then the site's state will change to
   "W" because we Want to scrape it. If the site coughs
   up an URL to syndicated data, its state changes to
   "R" since it must be Reviewed, and you get 50 points.
   If the site simply wants to be scraped, you only get
   25 points, since you did not do a sufficiently good
   job at evangelizing :-).

   If you are a Scraper, you will see the list of sites 
   in state "W". You can then do work on your side to
   scrape the site, enter the scraped URL, and then
   the state moves to "R", since it must be Reviewed.
   You get 100 points, since you probably wrote code,
   and you are probably volunteering processor and
   bandwidth resources as part of the deal.

4. All feeds in state "S" will be available in XML
   form. These feeds will then be accessible to news
   tools and to aggregator sites.

5. Eventually old feeds will die. Once we have a confirmed
   death, we will move it to state "X". Some of these
   could conceivably go to state "W" if the feed dies
   but the site lives on.

I've not really figured out what to do with the points,
other than to display them. Since there is a lot of 
legwork here, I do want to make sure that people get
credit for having made investments of time and effort
in the site. There are no penalty points. I was toying
with the idea of requiring certain custom XML feeds to
have a cost in points, but since several people have
volunteered to mirror the feed (and hence make sure that
my bandwidth bill does not get any higher above the
roof than it already is), this should not be needed.

To summarize the states for a feed, we have:

  -> D - Site desired to be syndicated
  -> E - Evangelization underway
  -> P - Syndicated URL known, to be polled (existence verified)
  -> A - Syndicated URL known, to be approved
  -> W - Want to be scraped
  -> S - Currently syndicated
  -> X - Once syndicated, now confirmed not to
  -> R - Rejected at some point

So, that's what I have so far. How does this sound?

BTW, the site already has 56 registered users. With a workforce
this big I am sure that we are going to do some great work
here.

Jeff;

Jeff Barr - Vertex Development - (mailto:jeff@vertexdev.com)
  Address:  4610 191st Place NE. Redmond, WA 98074; 
  Phone:    Office: 425-868-4919 - Home: 425-836-5624
  IM:       MSN: jeffscottbarr@hotmail.com; AIM: jeffscottbarr
  Homepage: http://www.vertexdev.com/~jeff
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