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Technocrat.net's Raison D’être And How To Write for Us
Here are some notes on how to write news postings for Technocrat.net, and why Technocrat.net is here.
Raison d’être
First, what are we here for? That determines what sort of postings we're interested in.
Technocrat.net's raison d’être is to empower individuals to have control over technology, and to empower technological people to involve themselves in the formation of technology policy. The alternative would be to have technology, a tremendous force in our lives, owned and spoon-fed to us by large companies that control it exclusively - and to an increasing extent, control us as well.
Scientists, engineers, and programmers understand technology better than the people who are generally promoting and making laws around technology. We are best aware of both the benefits and the pitfalls. Without our participation, the general public will be led to accept things that aren't good for democracy and the world. Technocrat.net helps us learn more about these issues and the politics around them, and helps us put that knowledge to work.
Who Are We?
We are literally the smartest individuals in technology.
To create a venue for such bright lights, we don't "dumb down" articles for the general audience, and we maintain a high intellectual level in discussion. But nor do we obfuscate or make articles more difficult to read than necessary. In order to draw people in who should do a little work to understand the news our article titles are written to be accessible to most people, and then they can stretch themselves a bit once they're here. If someone has to look up "obfuscate" once they're reading an article, we try to make that easy for them.
Where Do We Come From?
Our heritage is in other movements that empowered the individual to understand and have power over technology. The chief of these is the Free Software / Open Source movement, but there are other similar movements like Amateur Radio and the general tendency of smart people to tinker.
Slashdot
Another of our roots is a similar site called Slashdot.org . Slashdot played a formative role as the community voice of Open Source / Free Software during a time of tremendous growth in that community. Unfortunately, Slashdot has more recently abdicated that role to become, in the words of its editors, "a geek culture site". We recognise the lure of the mass-market. As we write this, Slashdot is within the top 300 sites on the web by readership, and we congratulate them. But the serious work is going to need to go on elsewhere. We're taking up that flag.
Another issue with Slashdot is immaturity. It's rife with trolls and other detriments to the signal-to-noise ratio. We start out on a path to improve the level of discussion over that in Slashdot by eschewing the "Anonymous Coward" who is rampant there. If you don't want to take responsibility for your words, they don't belong here. We encourage you to put your full name in your login, and participate in all discussion as a known individual. We will take other measures to maintain the highest possible quality of discussion as they become necessary.
Writing for Technocrat.net
Obviously, the site won't go anywhere without content, and we need your help with that.
What's Interesting
There are four main categories of news that we're interested in:
What's Not Interesting
Many of us enjoy these things, but they don't belong here: sports (including Amateur Radio contesting that doesn't have a public-service or emergency orientation), gaming, television, science fiction, product press releases from vendors, pseudoscience (we have to improve our pseudoscience filter).
Posting
There are essentially two sorts of postings: one that points to an article on another site, and one containing an entire article.
If you see - or write - an article that should interest our audience, post it here using the "Submit Story" link on the left. The reward is that you help to inform an entire community. The risk is that we won't approve your post. Sorry if that happens, please don't take it too hard. If it's a post pointing to a story elsewhere, hopefully it hasn't taken much of your time. If it's a post containing your own material, you're free to take it elsewhere (actually, you're free to do that even if we do accept it).
Copyright
Unless we negotiate some other agreement: You retain the copyright on anything you write here, and can do what you wish with it. You grant to Perens LLC a separate and independent copyright on the same work. Either of us can do what we wish with it. We may use that copyright to make your work available to others under a "Free" license.
Other People's Copyrights
Don't infringe upon other people's copyrights. That means, don't just cut and paste a story from another venue here unless that story is a press release (which is meant to be republished) or bears licensing that permits republishing. If the story has a license that allows republication and you don't own it, note both the copyright holder and the license in your story, so that we won't think that you have granted us rights upon the story, and so that we won't violate the license.
Be Fair With Attribution
If you got something elsewhere, say so and give them credit by linking back to the original piece. If you don't attribute something, we will assume you wrote it.
Length
The "preface", the part of the story that appears in our front page, should be one or two paragraphs. The rest of the story (if any) should be in the "body" portion and may be as long as you like.
Style
Write in an "inverted pyramid" style. That means that the most important fact goes in the first sentence, then the second most important fact, and so on followed by facts of progressively diminishing importance. This allows the reader to get the most from any story without necessarily reading the entire story. When the facts reach a level that isn't important for that particular reader, that reader will click the "next" button.
Links
Include links, making it as easy as possible for the user to access the interesting parts of the story. It's OK for the links to be in the preface. We're more interested in informing the reader than having them click-through to the story page on our site and see another ad.
Provoke Discussion
Ask a question in your story, to provoke discussion. Participation will add value to the story.
How Stories Are Published
If you have not been granted Author privilege on this site, a posting you write will be stored for one of our editors to review it. The editor will decide whether to publish or delete your posting. If you have the Author privilege, a story will appear on the front page as soon as you submit it. If you've written a few stories for us successfully and want the Author privilege, please ask. We will grant it or not depending on how well we feel you can judge your own work according to our editorial parameters. This is not the easiest thing to do, and sometimes we'll gently ask you to keep working with the editors. We can also remove the Author privilege arbitrarily - generally because you've not judged your own work as well as we'd like. This doesn't mean we hate you, it just means we want you to work with an editor.
If we like your judgement we may also grant you the Editor privilege. Editors can approve stories for publication and can edit or delete a story that's already been posted, and individual comments as well.
What About Money?
Currently, this site costs Perens LLC $500/month to operate, and that's coming right out of Bruce Perens' pocket. Whatever advertising we run doesn't begin to offset our costs. Eventually, we may become profitable - who knows? Our intent is always to do the right thing by our contributors - if you feel our policies aren't doing that, please write.