All right, the consensus from what I've seen is that I will not be given any special powers with the blog, but people really want me to write stuff for the blog. There seems to be this conception that I want to take my personal blog and just funnel it into the DS blog to promote my own stuff and hey I've made the DS blog great again!
This is not what I want, I don't know where this is coming from. In fact, the role I want to play in the DS blog is primarily not that of a content creator, because I don't think that's where I'll add value.
My unique ideas are only going to work in the capacity of a moderator. Maybe I don't need to have the ability to publish things to the blog if people are worried that I'll abuse it.
I can't write articles on a schedule. I can't come up with new topics and just write about them. If I could do that I would be a professional journalist and I wouldn't have time for my day job. In fact, I don't see anyone volunteering to write full time for the DS blog, so I don't think this is a reasonable expectation of anyone.
Given that, I don't think enforcing a schedule on a person or a group of people to have X articles written per week is going to be sustainable. I know for a fact that if this is how things are run, the community will run out of content in a few months. It's not sustainable.
But the blog needs to have content released on a regular schedule in order to be successful. How do you reconcile this? It's very similar to a certain practice of software engineering that I deal with at work: you use "actuals" to dictate your schedule. I haven't seen anyone anywhere talking about it yet.
Start by creating a backlog of articles that are ready to be published and a really easy pace -- one article per week, for example (all of the numbers here are just examples, they can be adjusted easily). Once you have enough content for three months, you start publishing. If you ever don't have enough content for one more month in reserve, slow down the pace. If you ever have enough content for 4 months (and have maintained that amount/pace for X time), speed up the pace. Let the creation of articles dictate the pace of the blog and start with expectations very low. If it ever becomes unsustainable, you'll get plenty of advance notice because you've capped the rate at which the backlog gets smaller, so there's this built-in time to solicit new articles and have them created at a relaxed pace so that they're actually good, as opposed to "oh crap I need to write another article by tomorrow" so I throw something together that really isn't good.
This model is something sustainable. However it's something I can't implement as just a content creator, I would need to be in a position where I can control the flow of when things get published. Well I guess now that I've shared this idea anyone can do it but honestly, was this going to happen before I shared it here? Stuff like this is why I need to be involved at the level I'm asking for, and I have a lot more...
F.DS has had a lot of trouble recently with new content creation. I've got a lot of ideas for how to improve the way articles are written so that we get more of them. How to get people from outside this community creating content and continuing to create content. Different types of content that will bring in a more diverse audience, beyond just "beginner articles and advanced articles". I'm not going to type it all now, but when whoever is going to run the blog is planning out how it will work, someone with my ideas and experience in knowing what's actually going to work is going to make that planning a lot more productive.
The point is, I'm not going to make the DS blog better by writing articles, I'm best used in the kind of capacity where I can put systems in place what will set up the blog for long-term success.