I’ve been feeling a bit down about GNOME Journal since our last planned issue for October fell apart at the last minute. There were a number of reasons and nobody’s fault but after the great success we’ve seen this year in having multiple issues published after not having published in 2008 I was afraid we were losing momentum again. (I’m very excited about our next issue, Women in GNOME, but was concerned about issues after that).

I am glad to have been proven wrong, and in the process, re-energized about GNOME Journal.

I had the opportunity to have lunch with Stormy earlier this week and mentioned to her that one of our authors, after seeing his article just not be ready, ask if there were any other articles he could write. After reviewing our article brainstorming list, I was stumped for ideas to give him as a number of the ideas were out of date. Having mentioned this to Stormy, she quickly added about a dozen ideas later in the week!

Then, out of the blue yesterday, Sumana jumped in and helped to update and re-organize our wiki pages and sent an email to the list mentioning the updates and some ideas for future issues.

After sending out my normal request for updates on the upcoming issue, two new volunteers sent emails within minutes of my email offering to help as well.

This is what I love about the GNOME community!

Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Journal and here are a few different ideas on how to participate:

• Have an idea for an article you’d like to see? Add it here.
• Want to write an article? Need an idea? See the same list. And if you’re not comfortable writing an article by yourself, collaboration is always encouraged! Send an email to the list and I know a number of writers, including myself, would be more than happy to co-write an article.
• Help edit an article for a writer. Review the article structure, review spelling and grammar and if possible add the needed markup for our CMS.

I’m still hopeful we’ll move from our current CMS (Textpattern) to WordPress-MU on blogs.gnome.org later this year. (Jeff Waugh – still need your help if you’re available!) Once that migration starts to occur we’ll also be looking for help and ideas around what WordPress plugins could enhance the GNOME Journal experience.