- Feature Name: community-banner-server
- Start Date: 2017-08-25
- RFC PR: (leave this empty)
- Rust Issue: (leave this empty)
Provide a server to promote recurring information into the community in the form of banners. This allows us to publish info that we want to spread constantly more consistently.
The usual way we promote new things is: "Hey, we've got the new thing here, please participate" - and then never again. This gives us a lot of spread at the time of publication, but then, we rely on person-to-person spread. Indeed, we are at a state where even seasoned people in the community suddenly hear of something that was announced quite a while ago. One-shot messaging is also often missed, as people might not be awake if it goes around.
Newcomers never hear about these campaigns, as - well, they weren't there at the time of the announcement. They only ever hear about things if:
- They raise the subject to someone that knows that there is something going on
- If someone directly talks to them
Examples of these things are:
- The Forge (https://forge.rust-lang.org)
- Servo Starters (https://starters.servo.org)
- CFPs and Ticket sales for conferences
- Promotion of upcoming or ongoing events like RustBridge
The solution to this is recurring messaging: regular spread the message, by re-linking to the announcements or pages of the project. For example, a Twitter account might tweet about a new announcement three times, for different time-zones. This cannot go on indefinitely, as social media accounts are built for an ongoing stream.
We're already, in the hiding, employing banner-like structures for this: for example, the main rust-lang page has a section that constantly presents a different language feature, forever and ever. Banners are an appropriate place for recurring messaging: they are always at the same place and they can hold changing content. Still, they can be flexibly integrated into a website by the owner of the site themselves, allowing them to be displayed at an appropriate place. Care should be taken that they integrate nicely into a page.
Banners have a bad rep because they are usually employed in a very intrusive fashion and don't give much context, but that doesn't make them a generally bad thing. Relevant banners are helpful and welcome, but great care must be taken to keep them relevant. Great care must be taken to optimize the "wow, today I learned"-factor high and keep the annoyance of people that already know about the thing down.
A primary goal here must be to keep the managing work low and easy.
One way to do this is having a central authority that handles publishing and un-publishing and then spreads to publishers.
Specialised central publishers are not a unusual and have a good reputation, as they can easily control relevance and annoyance. In the Rust space, it's relatively easy to build a relevance model of users without relying on invasive techniques.
It is obvious that this resembles the approach that advertising publishers use, but is only related on a technical level: there's no monetary interest involved and the service is to kept free of commercial interests.
https://github.com/rust-community/rust-campaigns-server/ is a server serving recurring messages relevant to the Rust community. It doesn't track anything and currently does no analysis about the location of the user. For ethical reasons, I'd like to be very conservative on this side, especially as impact analysis isn't the main reason behind this.
It's currently functional with a console only admin backend. There is an exemplary javascript embed code available, which can be used to put an unstyled banner on any website. It also has an API for custom creation of banners. Note that this API is not stable yet, but might be in the future. Its goal is to be conscious of users bandwidth, we don't want to apply a lot of styling and find ways to aggressively use browser caches.
These embed codes can be used on project pages or the pages of interested community members.
There's prior art for this, namely the Perl Community Ad Server.
Such a service must be maintained and kept running after committing to it, as people choosing to embed these banners rely on them not breaking their website.
Review must be done for each an every banner, which requires some people committed to this.
Keep things like they are.
What would be an acceptable policy to measure impact of this? Cross-site-tracking and user tracking is definitely out of scope, but for example taking click-numbers per banner could be a useful metric.