Open thread: How to improve our community discussion list?

Image by opensource.com

Let's talk about our community discussion list.

It's a public mailing list we created some time ago to facilitate conversation about opensource.com. We envisioned it as a channel for communication regarding both the website and the community that sustains it—not the content we feature here. And we think we can do a better job of using this list to encourage participation in opensource.com, to increase the level of transparency surrounding issues its management, and to foster collaboration between its community members.

When we launched the community discussion list, we billed it as a

list [...] for the opensource.com community, which includes the people who write, edit, moderate, maintain, publish, design, think about, make plans, sets policy and governance, and otherwise do the work that makes this a community practicing the open source way.

In that spirit, we think we can begin using the list to:

• Share group/channel moderators' requests for articles on particular topics
• Remind frequent contributors of opportunities to write
• Encourage community members to report from open source conferences and events they attend
• Connect writers with artists in our community who might produce Creative Commons-licensed images for articles
• Announce the site's presence at various events (and organize community meetups there)
• Initiate discussion of editorial decisions
• Report periodically on key site growth metrics and discuss our collective goals for opensource.com

So we'd like to hear from you. Do these proposed uses resonate with you? How else can we use our community discussion list to run opensource.com the open source way?