OSGeo site check
Arnulf Christl
arnulf.christl at ccgis.de
Thu Apr 20 10:18:12 PDT 2006
NO - don't scroll away! Its a long email, allright, but please take your
time to really read it. It was a lot of work.
----
Hi,
have been listening in to WebCom meeting yesterday. As a result I went
through the main pages of currently 21 subdomains of OSGeo and added a
few comments to each. Some of these comments could well trigger an
action (do something).
But who should do it? There is no separate distributor, therefore I
added all corresponding project owners (who i reckon to be responsible)
as recipients. Sorry for the mess in your inboxes.
It just might happen that we would want someone to qualify as quality
insurance officer and insure that projects that appear officially adhere
to some minimal web presence content and maintenance standards. Butting
in without any official mission i humbly suggest the following as
minimal web content until someone more capable has defined the standards
officially.
I went through Project home, Membership, Announcements, Mailing lists
and had a peek in Documents & files and Subversion. The Project Tracker
is not being used at all except by MapGuide (apparently the only buggy
software. Oh come on, that was meant to be a joke).
https://board.osgeo.org/ Add all directors as members. Add a picture of
our president (just to make him flinch every time he goes there).
https://collabtest.osgeo.org/ remove or hide
https://communitymapbuilder.osgeo.org/ add content (at least link to
project homepage)
https://conference.osgeo.org/ add content (at least link to FOSS4G)
https://edu.osgeo.org/ add content (at least the Wiki links)
https://fdo.osgeo.org/ OK, minimal information provided, could be enhanced
https://fundraising.osgeo.org/ OK. This is an example of the very most
basic information that i - ahm - anybody would expect to appear on the
web site of an active OSGeo project.
https://gdal.osgeo.org/ Excellent
https://geodata.osgeo.org/ Excellent. I suggest to add a 100pix image of
the earth to geodata files to get rid of the (0) and make people smile a
little.
https://geodata.osgeo.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList
http://geotools.org/ OK, good compromise, people see that something is
going on. You would probably also want to remove all Mailing Lists,
except that you plan to migrate or fork them:
https://geotools.osgeo.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList
Btw. GeoTools should be added to the category Open Source, even although
it is Java... :-) https://open-source-projects.osgeo.org/
https://incubator.osgeo.org/ OK.
https://mail.osgeo.org/ Excellent (maybe the special treatment for
Autodesk's MGOS lists is not required anymore and a link to the Getting
Started pages could help)
https://mapbender.osgeo.org/ Somewhat bumpy but fine, reflects the
character of the software (in FF the wheel never stops turning).
https://mapguide.osgeo.org/ Excellent. There are many "Microsoft" tags
inside, even in the license document. This is obviously very "normal"
but not everything that is very "normal" is good or has to stay that way:
https://mapguide.osgeo.org/source/browse/mapguide/trunk/MgDev/License.htm?rev=42&view=markup
((I had to look for something to niggle about so that the others
wouldn't get too envious on this premium site))
https://mapguide-jp.osgeo.org/ nottin'
https://mapserver.osgeo.org/ OK. But you should also (like GeoTools)
consider to remove all mailing list references. I wonder why nobody
subscribed to any yet?!
Maybe it makes sense to keep announcements at mapserver.osgeo.org open and
active for OSGeo related low volume traffic. Except you really want to
migrate the currently active mailing lists...
https://news.osgeo.org/ Needs content. There are several active news
channels that we could tap. For a starter the announcement list and the
software projects' respective news ticker.
https://numbers-testing.osgeo.org/ Huh???
https://ossim.osgeo.org/ OK, might want to just a little more text or an
image to enhance it, manage mailing lists (on/off/somewhere else), the
usual software project stuff.
https://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org/ OK, but needs more content
https://webcommittee.osgeo.org/ Just fine
I am missing http://grass.osgeo.org altogether?! It should be possible
to at least set up a facade that links to the original pages (like some
other software projects have done so far).
OK. This might seem a lot of work. But its not. You are the bosses. Grab
someone and tell them what to do.
Best regards,
Arnulf.
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