[Board] Text describing what OSGeo does

[Peter Batty]

I raised at a previous meeting that we used various different short
descriptions to say what we do, and I thought we should be more consistent
(I found this out when I was looking at the web site for a one or two
sentence description about OSGeo, and it wasn't obvious which one to use). I
took an action to share with the board what I'd seen as inconsistent and
make a proposal on how to fix it.

Here is what we currently say in various locations:

On the home page http://www.osgeo.org/:

Created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial
software. Our goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of
community-led projects.

On the "About the Foundation page"
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html

We have a couple of different short descriptions here. First is a slightly
longer description:

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit
organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative
development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation
provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open
source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity
to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources,
secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for
public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization
for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and
shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration.

Second is a mission statement:

To support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software,
and promote its widespread use.

So in each case the sentence (or two) describing what we do is different. I
wasn't so keen on the first sentence on the home page as it says we "support
and build" software but the foundation itself really doesn't build the
software, we support the building of it, which is what we say in the other
descriptions (we don't mention the word build elsewhere). The first sentence
on the about page I find confusing because it doesn't mention open source -
it says "open geospatial technologies and data". As we all know there are a
zillion definitions of "open" around source, standards, data etc so just
saying open, and mentioning data, is confusing to me. This sentence also
says "whose mission is ..." and then says something different from the
"mission statement" which is right below that.

Personally I like the (second) mission statement, I think it more accurately
describes what we do than either of the other two sentences. But I have to
dig quite a way into the site before finding that, if I was on the site
looking for a short description of what we do to use elsewhere it is
unlikely I would have used this, I would have used one of the short
descriptions I found before that.

So my short term proposal is fairly simple, I would suggest two changes. On
the "About" page, I propose we change the first sentence to:

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit
organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of
open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use.

Then we don't declare two separate missions on the same page :).

My second suggestion would be that we move this same sentence to the home
page, to replace the first two sentences there. If someone wants a short
description of what we do, they are likely to take whatever the home page
opens with. (I'd also suggest we consider copying the entire first paragraph
from the about page to the home page, I think we could use a little more
immediate content on the home page rather than just links to more content -
but can go either way on that, my primary suggestion here is about getting
consistency).

If there is a different sentence (other than the mission statement) that has
already been declared the "preferred" one then that's fine, my main point is
we shouldn't use different ones (some of which are confusing) in each of
these places, let's pick one and use it consistently.

That's it really. Frank, you said you were part of the group that makes
changes to the web site, I don't know what the process is from here, whether
this needs comment from the board or whether this is non-contentious and can
just be dealt with through the web site group.

Cheers,
    Peter.
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