Publicize syndication feeds for news (PRs, Planet, etc.) and events & release schedule calendars on the main website
The current GNOME website does not make it easy for people to discover and subscribe to news feeds (to subscribe to with apps such as Liferea or "Feeds" or Newsflash), keep track of upcoming events in their calendar, or keep track in their calendar of when a new release would be coming out.
I believe we should use and encourage the power of RSS/Atom/WebCal syndication feeds (which is one of the very few things left of the open web) for that, make it front-and-center discoverable by having some embedded news and agenda widgets and the feed icon(s) next to those widgets rather than depending on people discovering that by hunting through the pages' source code.
News
Currently the only way visitors can find news and status updates is by fishing out the tiny de-emphasized links in the footer all the way at the bottom of the page, and those links don't show easily noticed single feeds to subscribe to:
For written news, we have https://foundation.gnome.org/feed/ and https://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml or https://planet.gnome.org/rss20.xml but those are impossible to find unless you're a turbonerd.
Events and releases
Beyond written news, we should also advertise webcal calendar feeds (and encourage people to subscribe to them using GNOME Calendar or Evolution). As far as I know there is no foundation events (conferences, hackfests, etc.) calendar feed, and the releases calendar is only found by lurking onto https://wiki.gnome.org/Schedule (and that's because I added those links there myself, otherwise you'd have to go fishing into individual sub-pages):
For all releases, an online calendar is available to subscribe to: HTTP link, webcal link. You can subscribe to it with applications such as GNOME Calendar or Evolution.
I believe those would be easy low-hanging-fruit wins for GNOME in terms of the general public's engagement. The trickiest part is whether there already is an events calendar or if we should create a new one that people can subscribe to, and where, and who maintains it (presumably Foundation events coordination staffers?)
Other than that, this could all be added now or, "when a new website is ready" if a big overhaul is under way as part of at Teams/Engagement/websites/main-site#25