Hi Flow Community!
We’ve heard from community builders many times that Flow needs to do better at communicating and provide more detail, more regularly. We also want to help the Flow community learn more about what’s going on across the ecosystem, what’s new and useful, what you need to know that has changed etc. For that to all make sense, we also wanted to improve on how we share all that into the ecosystem itself. Here’s something new we’re trying.
It starts with a simple idea: https://github.com/onflow/flow/blob/master/agendas/2023/updates. One place for the Flow team and Flow community to gather updates that anyone wants to share, tracking by month. We decided on this partly to resolve some internal process churn around our collating this stuff. But then it seemed obvious that a bigger and compelling reason to have this was so that community members/projects could share their updates for maximum visibility.
The other thing to know about this is that updates provided in the updates repo above will be directly used for putting together Flow email newsletter, Flow socials, perhaps Flow blog updates, and also elsewhere. We like the idea of a single source of truth for Flow updates and hope you do too!
We’re just catching up on September updates: https://github.com/onflow/flow/blob/master/agendas/2023/updates/2023-09-Flow-Ecosystem-Updates.md - look forward to seeing your PRs!
FAQ
Can any community contributor or Flow project provide an update?
Yes any member, team or project can submit a PR to the update tracker for that month with the proposed markdown changes that best communicate their update. Flow team members will then review and merge.
What updates will be accepted?
There’s already a lot going on in the ecosystem and so the main focus must remain on delivered/shipped products or services, tooling, software versions etc. Major launches, milestones, noteworthy outcomes or achievements being met are of course included in that. Stuff that is useful to the community. Learnings, experiments or other R&D type efforts which demonstrate an educational or innovative value, for example composability, Cadence language nuances etc.
What updates will not be accepted?
In particular we cannot include in-progress project status updates. Also updates not related to Flow or the ecosystem, project/business advertisements, solicitations for help or funding, offers of funding, or anything else not demonstrably relevant to the Flow community.
When do community members need to provide updates?
The Flow team will publish monthly trackers at the start of a month giving teams time to contribute along the way.
Will my update be included in the Flow newsletter or otherwise be shared more broadly beyond this repo? If so when?
Flow makes no guarantee that updates provided in the monthly trackers will be shared more broadly, nor of the timing of those onward channels, such as the Flow newsletter. However, we will be using this format in Github as the main reference point for the newsletter. The main challenge is that onward channels are even further constrained by the level of detail they can provide and so necessarily must be shorter and less broad.
The updates repo will always reflect the full set of updates that were made for that month.
How detailed and/or how long can any individual update be in this tracker?
It’s important this these trackers stay readable and accessible. Boosting them with big paragraphs and large amounts of text would create inconsistency, but more importantly, would serve to drown out other updates.
We ask contributors to keep updates as short and concise as possible, with inline links to the details of your update. By keeping it short and simple makes it easy to contribute and consume.
Can we inline images?
Ideally we would try to avoid this, for the most part, but sometimes the power of an image is critical. Please consider the impact and relevance of the image - but providing they are in context and bring that relevance then they will be accepted.
Can we add or change the major headings?
Sure, we will accept suggestions and changes if people would like to propose them. We can discuss them in the PR and if it makes sense, it’ll merge.
