SR(A)WN

The Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly Newsletter (SR(A)WN) is a semi-regular newsletter written by volunteers for volunteers.

Availability

SR(A)WN can be consumed electronically from several places:

The frequency of SR(A)WN issues is dependent on how much is going on within SR. In general there is an aim to wait until there is a good amount of interesting content.

Production Process

The production process for SR(A)WN as of SR2021 follows the lifecycle in the following diagram:

graph LR issue(Issue Opened) contributions(Contributions Gathered) collation(Collation and Editing) PR(Pull Request) approval(PR Approved) publication(Publication) issue-->contributions contributions-->collation collation-->PR PR-->approval approval-->publication publication-->issue

Production is managed by the editor for a given issue of SR(A)WN. The editor is identifiable as the author of the GitHub Issue for that issue of SR(A)WN. There is currently not a process for assigning an editor and the position is currently held on a de-facto basis.

Production is performed on the SR(A)WN GitHub repository.

Managing Issue

The first stage in the production of an issue of SR(A)WN is the creation of the managing issue on GitHub.

The managing issue should be based on the submission thread template. The dates, times and issue numbering in the template should be updated appropriately. The editor will decide on a deadline for submissions for that issue, which is included in the template.

Contributions from volunteers should be submitted as comments on the managing issue before the deadline.

Editing

SR(A)WN is broadly organised into 3 sections:

  • Notices
    • Important notices regarding SR(A)WN. e.g update in place of publication
    • Rarely used
  • Headlines
    • Maximum of 3 very important news items.
  • News
    • News from around SR. Organised by category or (sub) team.

Content is collated from the managing issue and any news that the editor thinks is worth sharing.

The draft issue is submitted as a Pull Request to the SR(A)WN GitHub repository.

Publication

There are two stages to publication:

  • Merging the PR
    • This should close the managing issue
    • The Archive and RSS Feed will update automatically.
    • The Slack channel will post automatically.
  • Email the srawn Google Group.
    • This email should contain the HTML from the archive.
    • The subject line should be: SR20XX Issue XX, with the competition year and issue number appropriately filled in.
    • The email should be sent from the editor's SR email address.