At some point in the past year or two (maybe even earlier? But I know it’s not many years old) the Rails project started releasing roughly weekly ‘news’ posts, that mostly cover interesting or significant changes or bugfixes made to master (meaning they aren’t in a release yet, but will be in the next; I think the copy could make this more clear, actually!).
(Note, aggregated in rubyland too!).
I assume this was a reaction to a recognized problem with non-core developers and developer-users keeping up with “what the heck is going on with Rails” — watching the github repo(s) wasn’t a good solution, too overwhelming, info overload. And I think it worked to improve this situation! It’s a great idea! It makes it a lot easier to keep up with Rails, and a lot easier for a non-committing or non/rarely-contribution developer to maintain understanding of the Rails codebase. Heck, even for newbie developers, it can serve as pointers to areas of the Rails codebase they might want to look into and develop some familiarity with, or at least know exist!
I think it’s been quite successful at helping in those areas. Good job and thanks to Rails team.
I wonder if this is something the Hydra project might consider? It definitely has some issues for developers in those areas.
The trick is getting the developer resources to do it of course. I am not sure who writes the “This Week in Rails” posts — it might be a different core team dev every week? Or what methodology they use to compile it, if they’re writing on areas of the codebase they might not be familiar with either, just looking at the commit log and trying to summarize it for a wider audience, or what. I think you’d have to have at least some familiarity with the Rails codebase to write these well, if you don’t understand what’s going on yourself, you’re going to have trouble writing a useful summary. It would be interesting to do an interview with someone on Rails core team about how this works, how they do it, how well they think it’s working, etc.
Bibliographic Wilderness 
Hello! I am a member of the Rails core team. I started and manages the Rails newsletter. I once wrote about it here: http://brewhouse.io/blog/2014/04/24/this-week-in-rails-the-backstory.html, though it could probably use an update. If you are up for doing a write up on the interview (so I could link to it in the future when it comes up), I am quite happy to schedule a call with you to answer any questions you have. Would love to see more OSS projects do something like this!
Awesome, I’ll find some time and get in touch! How about a text interview on IRC, so we can just publish a transcript?