Community Blogging Guidelines

Guidelines for writing Blog Posts on the OSScamp Blog. Most of the guidelines are similar to Wikipedia's, especially those relating to tone and content of the posts.
Why you should blog on osscamp.in ?

• It is the premier community of open source enthusaists, with a total membership of 800+
• Gives you an opportunity to reach out to a huge number of niche readers
• New bloggers get an opportunity to build their clouts
• No barriers to blogging, you dont need to be an expert to air your voice

Guidelines

1. The blog has the following predefined categories: events, how-to, news, previews, reviews, tutorials. Bloggers are free to decide the tags of the post, but the category has to be one of these:
   • events - are any open source event announcement
   • how-to - are tips and tricks for anything open source
   • news - are industry news from the open source domain
   • previews - are reviews of upcoming open source tools and technologies
   • reviews - are reviews of existing open source tools and technologies; subject matter older than a year is not welcome
   • tutorials - are tutorials on open source tools and technologies
2. All opinions, observations and remarks made by any blogger in a blog post are attributable to the blogger, not to the community. Even though personal insights and opinions are promoted, no scandalous/controversial content should be posted.
3. All facts should be verifiable.
4. All blog posts have to be non-commercial, should be neutral, no-self promotion, and should have an open source or community theme
5. All images used in you blog post will not be more than 400pixels wide and 400 pixels high - either copyrighted by you or under fair use, with credits.
6. All blog posts will be licensed under creative commons attribution, non-commercial, sharealike, india 2.5 license
7. Bloggers may re-post blog posts already published elsewhere (or republish elsewhere blog posts published on OSScamp Blogs), if the above conditions are met in the following manner:
   • the post should only have a 100 word (max) abstract of the post
   • should have due credits at the end of the post in the following format: "This post was originally published at [Blog Name, with link to the post] by [author name, no link] on [date, no link]"
8. Any blogger that violates the blogging guidelines more than thrice, will be banned from the community website for a period of one month. any blogger to be banned thrice from the website, will be permanently banned
9. All blog posts will be subject to moderation by the moderation team, and will only get published once they are approved. The decision of the moderation team is not disputable. however, the blogger may appeal against disapproval of posts.
10. All guidelines are community approved. Any of the mentioned guidelines are subject to change, without any notice.

References

1. Why is providing credit and citing sources important: even though we dont follow the wikipedia's format and markup for citing sources, you will find some good reasons and methods of providing due credit and citing sources at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources
2. When providing external references and links in your blog post, try to follow the general idea given at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links
3. When using images in your post (especially when you dont own the copyright to the image), try to the follow general idea here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy
4. What is neutral content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
5. What is verifiable content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
6. Understandin the fuss about copyrights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights