[Marketing] Contacting entities that registered themselves in the SPD

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) wrote:
> Hi,
> I have done some spot checks in the SPD and noticed that quite a few
> entries do not link back to OSGeo or any of OSGeo's projects. In some
> cases the linked web sites do not even mention Open Source.
> 
> This is a lost marketing potential on one hand and does not reflect our
> philosophy (to promote Open Source geospatial). We could have a lot more
> visibility if more sites would link back to OSGeo and its projects.
> 
> Therefore I suggest that Marketing contacts companies and individuals who
> have registered themselves in the SPD once or in a regular interval (twice
> a year?) and explains these issues. In some cases I would also feel
> inclined to contact them personally. For this I would need to have access
> to the contact email address given in the registry.
> 
> What do you think, does this effort make sense? If yes I will ask SAC how
> to get the email addresses whilst assuring privacy.

Arnulf,

I agree we need a feedback loop.  We need to be able to contact SPD entry
owners when their entries is apparently not following our guidelines.  We
might also want to reach out to them for educational purposes and to encourage
them to better describe their foss4g related services though I'm somewhat
less enthusiastic about that.

Each SPD entry is administered and related to an OSGeo LDAP account which in
turn has an email address and name associated with it.

Currently there is no easy way to find out what OSGeo userid is associated
with an SPD entry.  It is in the mysql database used for the SPD but not
accessable on the web as far as I know.  My thinking had been that if someone
is logged into Drupal with an administrative account (any account in the
"administrators" group in LDAP) there should be an extra column in the
SPD tables showing the associated userid.

I would then modify the form at

   http://www.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_web_search.py

So that it would also show additional information if you are logged in
with an admin account - notably email address.

Reviewing your email, I can see it is much more about organizational
outreach than it is about SPD validation.  But I think the mechanism
described can support both sorts of efforts.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org