Improving The Bullhorn newsletter

gundalow
Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:09:25 +0000
Project Discussions

Hi folks,

I’m copying the ideas for improvement from Celebrating 200 editions of the Ansible Bullhorn! into this separate thread so we can discuss ideas.

Where does the Bullhorn go from here?

Looking ahead at the next 100 editions of the Bullhorn, we’d love to hear some of your thoughts and suggestions on how we can increase contributions, enhance how we engage with readers, and improve our content.

Automatically pulling news from other sources

Here are some of the improvements we already made around automation:

The Ansible Core Team added some automation by rolling out the ansible-announce bot that brings you updates on ansible-core releases (and first appeared in The Bullhorn #136).

All upcoming events (from the Ansible Events Calendar) are added into each Bullhorn. This includes all Ansible events on Meetup Pro (Forum Discussion).

We don’t want bots to take over contributions, but we hope these entries are useful.

Are there other places where we automate some useful information for our community?

What extra information could we add to make these updates more readable, useful and actionable?

Streamlining the publishing workflow

Perhaps we could automate, at least partially, the Bullhorn publishing workflow? This is largely a manual task that requires some special access in Matrix. However, it would be great to reduce manual burden, share more ownership with the community, and give more folks the ability to contribute by publishing the Bullhorn. These are the general Bullhorn editor steps if you want to see what we do to get each Bullhorn edition published.

Increasing the number of contributors

Speaking of Matrix, when you consider the distribution of contributors, it seems like a logical strategy to target increasing more mid-range contributors. How can we get more occasional contributors to submit content more often? Should do some gamification and add some forum badges?

Easier to submit news

What about lowering the barrier to entry even more to get more occasional contributors? Should we consider allowing submissions via the forum as well as Matrix? For example, post a topic with your news entry and tag it with something like “next-bullhorn” to submit to the next edition?

As a reminder, over the years we’ve experimented with news being submitted via:

Emailing Ansible Community Team

Post on a GitHub issue

Message on IRC

Message to Newsbot on Matrix

Improving the articles

What works (and more importantly), what doesn’t work for you with The Bullhorn? How can we improve the articles, structure, formatting, and so on, to help you. What Automation needs do you have that you think the Bullhorn could help with?

Social media & promotion

To get the Bullhorn out to a broader audience, should we improve our social media presence? At the moment, we publish to the forum and the r/ansible channel on Reddit.

Should we start getting out there on Bluesky or Mastodon?

Are there other places where you look for news and updates where we could add the Bullhorn?

We realize you are reading this, so how do we reach people that don’t currently know about the Bullhorn?

Talk to your colleagues and friends that use Ansible.

Do they know about The Bullhorn?

Where & how would they like to be informed about Ansible news?

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