[OSGeo-Discuss] Membership map, querying the wiki and more...

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

I'm always looking for more ways to summarise statistics about OSGeo  
and was reminded recently about some of the good work shown here - a  
map and a member list based on wiki categories and properties:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member

It's not a definitive list but is nice work, I'm not sure who to pat  
on the back - good job!

I've been trying to get to a place where I can get a list of Members,  
charter members, list of chapters and their members, projects and the  
members of their steering committees, etc.  Not so easy.

One way I like to present things during talks is by using graphical  
representations of the OSGeo ecosystem.  Some of you have seen the  
Freemind Mindmap approach I used before.[1]  I've also been able to  
start to pull wiki pages and their links to other pages out into a  
similar mindmap format.  See this test page for experiments based on  
my user page [2].  Memory and other issues prevent from doing too  
much more online in real-time though, and the tests might fail, but  
you get the idea.

These use the Semantic Mediawiki extension which also provides a  
powerful tool for querying the wiki.  You can add properties to pages  
(which I haven't explored yet), but even without them you can query  
across Categories.  Here is one example of querying for all the pages  
tagged as "OSGeo Member" and also related to a "Local Chapters" [3].   
And a more refined search that only shows User accounts that are  
tagged as member pages and also with Local Chapter tags [4].  Bit of  
a mind-bender but pretty neat when you see what it is really doing.

I'm wondering if we can get more out of the wiki using these fancy  
tools, without a lot of manual leg work.  It leaves me wondering if a  
simple form-based, user/member tracking tool might help - so members  
can simply select which projects/committees they are on, providing a  
simple record for generating reports from.

What do you think - is editing the wiki a higher barrier then filling  
in some forms?  Would it feel more "official" if you had to fill in a  
form and click "become an OSGeo Member"? :)

p.s. You can also output RDF though I haven't used it for much yet,  
and not sure it is really working [5]

[1] Slide 8 & 9 show mindmap: http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/community/ 
presentations/20070925-Victoria/OSGeoCommunity.html
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Test_Graphs
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php? 
title=Special:Ask&offset=0&limit=500&q=+%5B%5BCategory%3ALocal 
+Chapters%7CCategory%3AOSGeo+Member%5D%5D&p=format%3Dbroadtable
[4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php? 
title=Special:Ask&offset=0&limit=500&q=%5B%5B%3A%2B%7C%7CUser%3A%2B%5D 
%5D+%5B%5BCategory%3AOSGeo+Member%5D%5D+%5B%5BCategory%3ALocal 
+Chapters%5D%5D&p=format%3Dbroadtable
[5] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:ExportRDF/