External Communication & Social Media#

pyOpenSci uses several popular social channels and platforms to connect with the community including:

social media accounts on BlueSky and Mastodon
LinkedIn
A blog on our organization’s website
YouTube

Linktree#

Linktree is a social media landing page that allows users to share multiple links from a single page, which is useful for landing pages on social media sites that provide limited space for external links.

Our active sites, platforms, and social media accounts are documented in a Linktr.ee account. The Linktr.ee link is shared in the Description of our social media sites.

Accessing and editing Linktr.ee:

Login at linktr.ee
Click on “Admin”
Add new links by clicking on the “Add link” button, or edit existing links by clicking on the pencil next to the title and//or URL
Current linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/pyopensci

pyOpenSci blog#

The pyOpenSci blog lives on our website. The website is driven by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub pages. The code for the website is stored in pyopensci.github.io GitHub repository.

Blog goals#

The goals of the pyOpenSci blog include:

Promotion of pyOpenSci accepted scientific Python packages
Celebration and recognition of pyOpenSci community members
Discussion of modern topics, tools, and resources that are of use to the broader open science and scientific Python community
Share pyOpenSci news and updates
Promote pyOpenSci events
Build domain authority around Python, open science, and open source through search engine optimization (SEO)

How to add a new blog post#

Currently, there are several groups of people who submit blog posts to the pyOpenSci blog: pyOpenSci staff, package authors/maintainers of pyOpenSci packages, and pyOpenSci community members and friends who have participated in a pyOpenSci event. If you are interested in submitting a blog post to pyOpenSci, please contact us at media@pyopensci.org to discuss your post before writing it and submitting a pull request to our GitHub repository.

Blog post submission process#

The pyOpenSci blog post submission process defined below should be used by everyone submitting a blog post.

Fork the pyOpenSci website GitHub repository: pyOpenSci/pyopensci.github.io.
Work on your blog post locally.
- Be sure to include alt text for all images submitted as a part of your blog post

```{figure} filepath/to/your/image.png
:scale: 100 %
:alt: This text will appear as the alt text to your image.

This text will appear as the caption to your image.
```

Next, create an entry in the authors.yml file if you do not already have one. To create an author page, submit a pull request from your fork of the pyOpenSci website repository, with changes to the authors.yml file. If you would like to include a headshot, you can add it to the people directory in the images directory.
Submit a pull request from your fork of the website repo to pyOpenSci/pyopensci.github.io.
Ensure the blog post passes CI (continuous integration) checks that look for spelling errors, broken links, and more. Please note that occasionally the htmlproofer check will fail because your new blog post URL does not exist yet online.
Once your post and the pull request adding it to our website is complete, request a review on GitHub. A member of the pyOpenSci team should always review any new content being added to the website.
Your pull request can be merged once you have an approving review. A member of pyOpenSci’s staff or contributor team will merge your post.

Note

pyOpenSci has GitHub organization-wide policies in place that require all pull requests are reviewed before being merged. Sometimes, we may bypass those if the PR is a small fix or critical update. In most cases a review is preferred.

Yaml elements required for blog posts

All package authors, maintainers (and users) of a pyOpenSci-accepted package are welcome and encouraged to submit a blog post (or series of blog posts) about their review experience and/or the use of the package. When submitting your blog post, please include the following YAML elements:

layout: single
title: "The title of your blog post"
excerpt: "One to three sentences summarizing your post. This text will appear on our [blog landing page](https://pyopensci.org/blog)"
author: "Your name"
permalink: /blog/url-for-your-post.html
header:
  overlay_image: images/headers/your-blog-post-header-image.png
  overlay_filter: rgba(20, 13, 36, 0.8)
categories:
  - blog-post
  - community
classes: wide
toc: true
last_modified: 2024-08-26 # update the date here!
comments: true
---

For more information on how pyOpenSci uses GitHub, please refer to the GitHub section of our handbook.

Promoting blog posts#

All blog posts should be promoted, regardless of whether or not they were written by a guest or a pyOpenSci employee! For promotion, coordinate with the Community Manager to ensure that there’s a tailored message for each of the following platforms:

Slack
Discourse
BlueSky
LinkedIn
Fosstodon

In addition to pyOpenSci social outreach, we monitor social media for any personal posts that authors have created. To promote these posts, we will repost.

Blog post tone#

While we encourage guest authors to use a tone of voice that is authentic to them, the pyOpenSci blog uses a friendly, engaging, and curious tone. Although there are times when a post is written from the pyOpenSci perspective and uses the terms “we” or even refers to pyOpenSci in the third person, it is more common for a post to be written from the author’s perspective and incorporate the use of “I.”

An example of this is the pyOpenSci @ SciPy 2024 - Python Packaging Tutorials, Talks and Community post, which incorporates personal anecdotes with data, images, and the author’s reflections on the experience.

YouTube#

The pyOpenSci YouTube channel is still under development and currently only has one published video. While we are still in the process of developing a YouTube strategy, the best practices for YouTube videos include the following:

Provide accurate captions
Create an eye-catching thumbnail for each video, using a similar design aesthetic for videos that occur in a series
Use timestamps in the video description
Promote the video on socials within the first 20 minutes of the video launching
Use no more than two hashtags per video

At this point in time, there are no active goals or success metrics for the YouTube channel. We’ll be sure to update this section once we’re regularly updating our channel!

Newsletters#

The goals of the pyOpenSci newsletter are similar to our blog goals, with the addition of reaching a broader audience beyond website visitors. pyOpenSci uses LinkedIn as a newsletter platform, as many of our current (and future!) community members are on this platform. Using LinkedIn allows us to leverage our existing audience and create consistent communication to help further community connections.

We publish two newsletters:

A weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, published on Thursdays
A monthly newsletter published on LinkedIn and sent to all newsletter subscribers

The weekly LinkedIn newsletter has three main categories:

The monthly round-up edition, sharing and celebrating pyOpenSci and community wins over the past month
A monthly “Community News” edition, which shares conversations, discussions, and decisions that have taken place in Slack as well as on Discourse and GitHub, that are relevant to the broader community
Re-posts of interesting pyOpenSci blog posts

These posts are all structured as blog posts, using appropriate heading and subheading formats within LinkedIn. In fact, all of our newsletters are first published on the pyOpenSci blog, and should follow the same tone and format.

When a newsletter post is a re-post from the pyOpenSci blog, it’s important to include text and a link back to the original blog post, indicating where the post was originally published. This prevents link cannibalization, where different links with the same content compete for keyword rankings. We want all keyword rankings to be directed back to the pyOpenSci website wherever possible.

There are instances in which we publish content from another individual on our website, for example, Eric Ma’s upcoming blog post for the pyOpenSci Open Science Fall Festival 2024. In these cases, we’d want to include a canonical meta element in the HTML for the version being posted on the pyOpenSci blog. This can be accomplished by including the <link rel="canonical" href="www.original-post-web-url.com"> tag in the header of the post.