[Systers-dev] Systers - Spread the word: Press Guidelines

[k roy]

Hello,

As this is my first mail to the list so I would like to first introduce
myself. I am Kalpana Roy, final year student pursuing my B.Tech (Information
Technology), from India. I came to know about Systers through this year's
Google Summer of Code and decided to apply to its project idea of improving
the Systers' mailman archives and search option. I have been lurking around
the IRC channel since then and have been an observer of the list mails. The
idea of having a private female-only community appealed to me and I have
decided to volunteer to help in Systers list development and maintenance.
My impressions about Systers were that the community was very active but
there were very few volunteers who actually maintain the list. Also the
biggest surprise was the fact that in spite of being into existence since
1987, this online community was not extremely popular on the net. On looking
up Systers in Google, in most cases the search engine asks if we wanted to
type Sisters or Systems. Hence, I would like to urge the community to spread
the word about Systers community and popularise it. The idea behind is not
only having more and more women become aware of this wonderful group of like
minded women but also to have more volunteers who can help build and
maintain this community.
I have a few suggestions for spreading the word about Systers. For starters,
an official press guideline can be released with guidelines and templates
showing the correct usage of Systers and also pointing out where the
community should or should not be mentioned. Also Systers does not have an
official logo; currently it is associated with the Anita Borg Institute
logo. An official Systers logo can be extremely handy in popularising the
community and can be modified for other sub-groups within Systers (PHD,
Entrepreneur, SoC) like the BarCamp logos (http://barcamp.org/LogoGallery).
Also, it will be very good if Systers can become a part of the communication
technologies like maintaining a blog, having accounts on popular social
networking channels (Systers has one on Facebook), and microblogging sites
like Twitter.
Just my thoughts on making the community popular and recognised and also to
attract more people to volunteer and help.

The second thing which I would like to share is that I have made a Google
custom search engine (
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=partner-pub-3742164662838828%3Aayxvh4-pm7n)
for giving better results related to FOSS and related internship and job
opportunities and also GSoC. The new Systers wiki (
http://systers.org/systers-dev/) has not been yet indexed by Google and
hence it does not turn up in the results. The sitemap of the wiki (
http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/sitemap?do=index) is not recognised
by Google as a correct sitemap format hence I would request the wiki
maintainers to submit a sitemap for the same.

Thanking you,
~kr0y.

-- 
~ Once you have flown, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned
skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return --Da Vinci