Editorial Policy

OSSG group members can contribute stories and events to the site, subject to moderation, in addition to those provided by the committee. When you log in and follow the “site admin” link you will be able to write a post and save it. Then, subject to moderation and perhaps amendments, your contribution will be posted on the site for other group members to see.

In keeping with the aims of the group and the BCS itself, posts and events should abide by the following simple content guidelines:

  1. Most importantly, members should abide by the BCS Code of Conduct, the BCS Code of Good Practice and the Group Constitution
  2. All content should be related to the field of Open Source software, ideally in the UK
  3. When writing new content, impartiality and balance should be maintained, insofar as this is possible. Linking or referring to external partisan content is perfectly acceptable on condition that the potential bias is discussed in the post body.This is especially important when reporting findings from studies etc.
  4. No commercial advertisements such as those for jobs or products are permitted. Announcement of commercially-sponsored OSS-related events are allowed, however.

The process of posting is simple:

  1. Write your post
  2. Select “save as draft” when you are done
  3. Optionally, e-mail the webmaster to get your post moderated quickly. Otherwise your post will wait to be moderated until a committee member logs in, notices the draft and approves it.
  4. To keep your work private, set Post Status to “private” rather than “draft”

In common with most “blog”-style sites, you can place your post in several categories. At present the categories reflect the named forums on the original site (licencing, business, agile methods etc.) plus special categories for News, Events, Press Coverage, Committee Activity and information such as this related to the running of the site. If you need other categories, please contact the webmaster and/or note the categories you want in your post draft.

Further technical help on posting and general wordpress matters may be found in the Codex

To minimise the group’s liability, all website posts are moderated before being made available. In addition you may comment directly on all posted items without explicit moderation other than a spam check. General discussion takes place on the ossg-members mailing list. In all cases, comments and posts are owned by their authors and the views therein are not necessarily those of the Open Source Specialist Group or the BCS

For a more detailed guide to posting events, please see this page.

Disclaimer: Comments and posts are owned by their authors and the views therein are not necessarily those of the Open Source Specialist Group or the BCS.