✨ Enhancement: Proposal for User-Submitted Blog Posts on the JSON Schema Blog

[Adi-204]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Currently, the JSON Schema blog accepts content exclusively from a limited group of contributors: JSON Schema maintainers, contributors, implementation maintainers, and JSON Schema Champions. While this ensures a certain level of expertise and quality, it also restricts the diversity of voices and perspectives within the community. As a result, many valuable insights, experiences, and use cases from other community members remain untapped. The existing process for submitting blog content requires users to raise a Pull Request (PR) to contribute, which can be cumbersome and intimidating for those who may not be familiar with Git or the PR process. This can discourage potential contributors from sharing their knowledge and experiences, ultimately limiting the richness and variety of content available on the blog.

Describe the solution you'd like

Proposed Implementation

1. Submission Form Development: Create a user-friendly online form where users can submit their blog ideas and content. The form should include fields for:
   a) Title of the blog post
   b) Author name and contact information
   c) Blog type (Tooling, Community, Ambassador, Opinion, Update, Engineering)
   d) Content of the blog post (with a word limit)
   e) A checkbox for permission from their organization to publish the content
   f) Links to relevant external sites (if applicable)

2. Review Process: Establish a review process for submitted blog posts. This could involve: A committee to review submissions for relevance, quality, and adherence to the blog guidelines.
   Providing constructive feedback to authors if their submission requires revisions or is not suitable for publication.

3. Publication and Attribution: Once a submission is approved, it should be published on the JSON Schema blog with proper attribution to the author.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

Advantages of implementing above feature -

1. Increased Community Engagement
2. Diversity of Perspectives
3. Enhanced Content Quality
4. Promotion of Open Source Principles
5. Knowledge Sharing and Learning

Are you working on this?

Yes

[gregsdennis]

Thank you for submitting this. I think we already address much of this in our blog guidelines.

We (the TSC) did discuss this at length after having received a PR for a blog post that made several incorrect assumptions about how JSON Schema works and then followed those assumptions to suggest drastic breaking (and unnecessary) changes to the specification. We concluded that we want this site's blog to be reserved for posts by experts that champion and promote JSON Schema rather than ones that attempt to tear it down.

We recognize that people outside this core group still have valid opinions, and we encourage them to post their opinions on other sites, such as Medium.

We accept content from JSON Schema maintainers and contributors, implementation maintainers, and JSON Schema Champions.

The post topics that I see that this falls short are "Use cases and success stories" and "Industry insight into JSON Schema adoption". I agree that these should be able to come from anywhere, however they would still require TSC scrutiny.

Note also that "Champions" have yet to be strictly defined, and is tentatively inclusive of "experts, educators, authors, and event organizers relevant to the JSON Schema ecosystem".

which can be cumbersome and intimidating for those who may not be familiar with Git or the PR process

We expect contributors to JSON Schema to be developers or at least developer-adjacent, and as such, we expect them to be somewhat familiar with git and PRs. This may be an incorrect assumption, but I feel it's a realistic expectation.

2. Review Process: Establish a review process for submitted blog posts. This could involve: A committee to review submissions for relevance, quality, and adherence to the blog guidelines. Providing constructive feedback to authors if their submission requires revisions or is not suitable for publication.

We have this already. We use PRs, and the TSC reviews since we know the kinds of posts we want for the blog.

In particular to the review process itself, we're using the infrastructure already provided to us by GitHub. If we were to use some other system for submissions and reviews, we would need to do a lot of work to integrate it into this repository as this is the source for the site (which contains the blog).

3. Publication and Attribution: Once a submission is approved, it should be published on the JSON Schema blog with proper attribution to the author.

Blog posts are already published with the author. The author can set this when submitting a PR.

Promotion of Open Source Principles

Submission is relatively open. While review is also open to all (anyone with a Github account), the TSC and Ambassadors must approve the submission.

[jdesrosiers]

I don't think there's anything wrong with the process for submitting a blog and we do accept user-submitted blogs. Anyone promoting JSON Schema or educating about JSON Schema can be considered a JSON Schema Champion. You don't need to have a position in our org to submit a post. Just be aware that our blog site is not a social media platform where you can post whatever you like. All posts need to be approved by the TSC and Ambassadors for accuracy, quality, and messaging consistent with our vision. The post from the guy Greg mentioned was rejected for all three of those criteria, not because he didn't have an official position here at JSON Schema. He was someone who wrote an academic paper on JSON Schema. Normally, that's the kind of person we would love to see contribute a blog post.