MaidSafe is busy and our community is busy, a lot is going on and developments are being made on a daily basis. As a community, we use the SAFE Network Forum to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation. We also use the forum to keep informed on the status of MaidSafe developments.
Let’s have a look at what the current options are for someone who wants to follow what’s going on in Project SAFE.
SAFE Network Forum
The forum is a great place for having civilized discussions, asking technical & non-technical questions, and reading informative conversations. But if your primary goal is to stay informed, it can get quite overwhelming especially if you only check the forum a few times a week. There are so many new topics and replies that it’s hard to quickly figure out what the most important posts of the week are.
Once you have an account, Discourse does a great job at keeping track of what you’ve read, but if you don’t visit for a few days it can be easy to fall behind. Discussions can get long and interesting, there is a lot of information to soak in. There is an option to receive a weekly digest but it doesn’t necessarily highlight the most significant news.
Blogs
Blogs (e.g. blog.maidsafe.net, safecrossroads.net, metaquestions.me, etc.) are excellent news sources and are easy to subscribe to via RSS (or sometimes via email). But we can’t expect blogs to cover every single piece of significant news. And if many blog posts are published in a given week, it can be hard to figure out which of the posts are the most significant (unless you look at the forum, but even then, it’s not as easy as it could be).
GitHub
It’s possible to subscribe to the individual MaidSafe repositories and watch for updates. But if you are not a developer, it can be hard to filter out the most significant updates. That’s why we have the Weekly Dev Updates, but it can still be cool to look directly at GitHub sometimes (e.g. for the RFC papers and discussions).
JIRA
It’s cool to look at the JIRA dashboard once in a while, but again, if you’re not a core dev, it’s probably better to just read the Weekly Dev Updates.
A good option, but you need to actually create an account and understand how to use Twitter. And if there are a lot of tweets in a given period, it can be hard to figure which ones are most significant.
/r/maidsafe
There is a MaidSafe subreddit, which is great for people who like to check Reddit often, but it’s not very active at the moment. We also have to keep in mind that the subreddit is hosted on servers controlled by Reddit.
As you can see, the current options are all very time-consuming. Wouldn’t if be great if you could just enter your email on a website (no need to create an account) and automatically receive the top 10 posts of the week?
And what if that newsletter was generated automatically based on the votes of the people who participate in Project SAFE? People who want to could create an account, submit new posts and vote for what they think are the most significant posts of a given week.
This is exactly what we’ve done with Project SAFE News.
A good inspiration for what we want to do is the content of the /r/bitcoin subreddit, in the sense that it allows you to quickly see what’s going on in Bitcoin (instead of going to BitcoinTalk). But instead of using Reddit, we can host the open source Telescope software on servers we control, have a simple and clean design and let people subscribe to a weekly newsletter without creating an account.
We’ve also taken inspiration from Product Hunt. We like how they separate the posts on the homepage by days instead of showing an infinite list of the “hottest” posts like on Reddit. That way, you can visit projectsafe.news every day and focus on the posts for that day. And if you miss a day or two, you can quickly see what the top posts were for that day. It feels less overwhelming than having a single list of top posts.
Since Telescope is built with Meteor (which I am very familiar with), we can easily customize pretty much anything about Project SAFE News.
The source code for Project SAFE News is hosted on GitHub (so far I have only made very minor customizations).
The main goal of Project SAFE News is to generate a weekly newsletter of the most significant links based on the votes of the community. This will help all of us to stay current with the advancements of Project SAFE and will also be an easy way to initiate someone to Project SAFE (by recommending they subscribe to the newsletter).
Come check out projectsafe.news, post your links, vote on others and help create the weekly newsletter!
If you are interested in what you see, have some feedback or just like the idea, we can have conversations here on the forum and also on the #newsletter Slack channel (you can join projectsafe.slack.com by entering your email here).
Also, we are currently looking for people who would like to help us out moderate the site, if you are interested please contact us.
Most importantly, please create an account, visit the site every day and vote on your favorite posts. In order to grow the community and spread the word about Project SAFE, please share this site with whatever social network it is that you use 
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