Community Updates
Community Updates are a digest of news, discussions and notifications from the OpenStreetMap community. The community updates idea (news digest) has lived and died in various forms over the years. It's an obvious way to help people cope with the traffic on the Contact channels, but it involves a lot of compilation work for somebody.
These days this idea is called...
Head there to read the updates and/or learn how to get involved in contributing.
Old community updates maintained on the wiki
Between 2010 and 2011 we had a thing called "Community Updates" directly here on this wiki page.
Community Updates/Archive has all the links to these updates
The updates were available as an RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OSM_Community_Updates
There also an old page: /How to help. And Community Updates/draft was the starting point for each update.