Add link to bitcoinpresscenter.org

[aantonop]

Please add a link to the independent site bitcoinpresscenter.org to the main press page of bitcoin.org.

The bitcoinpresscenter.org provides much richer information about press contacts, a more fair randomized display order, nine languages and multilingual contact records and a comprehensive and very effective faceted search and navigation panel (left sidebar).

Alternatively, remove the Press page from bitcoin.org and allow a completely independent site to offer press contacts without implicit or explicit endorsement from bitcoin.org and in an inclusive way.

Thank you for consideration

[luke-jr]

ACK concept. Linked site still needs work, though... right now it fills the top half of my window with just the title, and the bottom half ends with "No Press Contacts Found."

[aantonop]

Luke, agreed with the need to fix some things, I don't expect this Pull Request will be settled immediately, and I hope to get feedback using it as a discussion basis - exactly what you offered.

May I ask for some details, I cannot replicate the bug that does not show press contact. Can you send me a screenshot or tell me what browser, OS, language combination produced this result?

I have asked the designer to resize the header. Many other little CSS tweaks will also be done in the next 24hrs, based on my existing observations and any suggestions or other bugs found here.

[luke-jr]

http://luke.dashjr.org/tmp/screenshots/snapshot100.png QupZilla from git with Qt 4.8

[aantonop]

I think I see the problem. For some reason your browser language is mis-identified as Chinese (Simplified). The only part that is current translated to Chinese are the "My Account" and "Log Out" links, which appear in your browser in Chinese in your screenshot under the main menu. In turn, this causes it to narrow the list to chinese language translated contact records, of which there are none so far.

I need to fix 2-3 things:

1. One languages are enabled, the language switcher will make this obvious
2. The message should say "No press contacts found in $LANGUAGE - Try English" or something
3. The browscap module is misunderstanding your browser language string. I assume your browser is not set to Chinese is it?

That's a pretty obscure bug, glad you use a somewhat rare browser and found it immediately. Nice bug hunting. Fixing ASAP, will ask for a re-test when done, thanks

[luke-jr]

No, I think that may be a bug in Qt 4.8; it's sending my language preferences, but then a wildcard (anything else) as "just as good" :/

[saivann]

I also think this is a good idea. A seperate community-driven press center can offer many things that we can't do on bitcoin.org for different reasons and looks at least like a good complement to me

Like Luke-Jr, I think we should still let the website evolve before everything. Andreas, did you get people to help you to manage the press center? Also, is there any prefered way to contact you directly for bugs / improvements?

[aantonop]

info@bitcoinpresscenter.org goes to my personal email for now, I would like to get it going to a group, or perhaps the press center mailing list. For now I am managing by myself, but it is structured to allow multiple site moderators. The role of the moderator is just custodial - see new content, check for accuracy, ask the pundit if they want to be listed, help fix any errors or typos and hit "publish" once all that is done. It's a job that any number of volunteers could do easily. Anyone who wants should let me know and I will give them moderator access.

The "site admin" account has the ability to change the structure, add languages etc. It's more destructive, so I will give to say saivann, to avoid single-point-of-failure on me. Just register and I'll add permissions accordingly.

Over the past two days 5 new contacts have been added. I hope everyone here and others will add many more, especially those who speak other languages and live outside the US. We have a few, but that's a major area of value for this site. I am not adding people, I don't want to even create the impression of bias, so others will have to do it. Just register and "Add Contact".

@luke-jr I think the bug has been fixed, so even with a weird language string, it should load the English site now. Let me know by email at info@bitcoinpresscenter.org if it is still weird (just so we don't spam this PR with bugs). Any other bugs, any one else, also send me email.

Thank you for the feedback and support!

[aantonop]

Bug fixes and visual changes implemented. We now have more than 30 contacts (a dozen more in the queue), with 8 countries and languages. I have proposals for speakers of Hindi, Greek, Romanian, Polish, Danish and Swedish to add next.

I believe the site is ready for public display, but I welcome further feedback.

Thanks!

[emansipater]

@aantonop is there still a plan to implement some sort of ranking mechanism so that it isn't just a flood of people? And great work, btw.

[mikehearn]

Looks good to me!

I still think the name is a bit confusingly similar to the existing page and besides, with all that nice infrastructure it'd be cool to evolve it more in the direction of a general contacts directory. As you already can sort people by expertise it doesn't seem like a big stretch to open it up also to people offering contracting services, academic peer reviewers and other interesting categories that wouldn't be useful for the press. So perhaps something like "Bitcoin Contacts Directory" or "Bitcoin People Center" would be a more flexible name. There'd still be a link from the existing press page of course, it could go to a page that has a default query that selects people who are willing to talk to journalists and excludes those who don't.

[saivann]

I love the idea of turning bitcoinpresscenter.org into a wide human resource center (note, maybe duplicative with http://btcxperts.com/). That said, it would probably need a different domain name if it was to go in that direction. But that could makes it exponentially more useful to help develop Bitcoin everywhere.

Meanwhile, for the same reason, unless Andreas choses to change it's domain name, it's probably easier for us to change our title. Does "Bitcoin for Press" sounds correct in english? Because it would actually be more consistent with the rest of the website. Otherwise, maybe it's not so much a problem if both press center compete on top of Google search results, both are relevant.

[aantonop]

This is a bit off topic for the pull request, but since people offered great feedback I'd like to respond and outline the vision I have for this site:

I have plans to expand towards highlighting consultants etc. The domain for that is bitexperts.net (or something like that), which I purchased. The press center component will simply be a filtered subset of those wanting to speak to press, as Mike Hearn suggested. That was always the plan if there was interest.

Also have plans to break out the citations into a page of press mentions and links, with ratings.

The overall reviews and ratings system is going into development on Tuesday after the conference. I plan three tiers: qualitative positive reviews (endorsements) on each contact, ratings of those reviews by readers and ratings of the citations/links. I plan on making a composite scoring and ranking system such as: completeness of profile + number of reviews * review score + number of links * link score. Something like that, which can be tweaked. There will be no negative ratings - essentially a lack of endorsements will be enough to drop a contact to the end of the list.

Now that this is an acceptable site and has received good feedback, it will be actively developed by my team and we will be investing time and money to build it out more. I'll have a better roadmap after my team meeting on Monday. At that point I will solicit more feedback for the roadmap. I expect to release the new features over the following 4-6 weeks, at a rapid pace of development, testing and release.

[aantonop]

A quick "bump" for this pull request and an update on the bitcoinpresscenter.org site.

We now list 63 press contacts from 19 countries speaking 22 languages. Despite any initial concerns about the list being "stuffed" with irrelevant people, I have found that it is nicely self-moderating - people hesitate to add themselves unless they have a solid bio and citations. As a result, the vast majority of the listings are very high quality press contacts with solid bios and many relevant citations.

I would like to respectfully request that the bitcoinpresscenter.org is added on the Press page, as an independent source of press contacts. The site is better, easier to navigate, stable and contains a veritable "who's who" of the best bitcoin evangelists speaking more languages than I imagined possible at first.

Also, every single person who is on the bitcoin.org Press page is also on the bitcoinpresscenter.

I invite you to visit, join, add contacts and I ask that you seriously and expediently consider this pull request. It is long overdue for consideration and the bitcoinpresscenter.org has more than proved its merit and independence.

Thank you for your consideration

[saivann]

Right now the consensus is that bitcoinpresscenter.org and https://bitcoinfoundation.org/contact will be linked. It has been well received and nice work has been done there. There are remaining discussions though and I'm also working on many other things on bitcoin.org but I guess it won't take long before I update the pull request and push it.

[saivann]

@aantonop : The link has been added. Thanks for your constructive work on this. This seems like a good start and with a team of people dedicated to the project, it has a good potential to continue to improve. I wish that more talented people continue to join, let's see how it goes.

I am also looking forward for an organic vote system to be implemented (if that's still in your plan) or otherwise if you prefer it to focus on specific filters (expertises, languages, location, etc), I'd like to suggest a simple neutral ordered display. Currently it seems like recently added interviewees appears at the top. And of course, I encourage any good idea that can help interviewees to maintain a good level of accuracy with their interviews.