[OSGeo-Discuss] Any plan for improving "Service Providers"?

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Jacolin Yves schrieb:
> Le Monday 03 August 2009 20:13:09 Frank Warmerdam, vous avez écrit :
>> Yves Jacolin (free) wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Anyone could tell me it there are any plan for improving the Service
>>> Provider [1] ?
>>>
>>> For instance, add more information about service provided by each company
>>> like formation, support, custom dev, development of OSGeo application,
>>> etc.
>> Yves,
>>
>> There was a plan to add indicators for service providers that had
>> contributed back to the community in a variety of ways (sponsorships,
>> supporting projects with developers, etc), but it never was implemented.
>>
>>    http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SPD_Prioritization
>>
>> I have tried to avoid attempting to describe services in too much detail
>> within the application itself, and instead *hoped* that organizations would
>> provide a landing page that gave a good description of their services
>> appropriate to people coming from the service provider directory.
>>
>> Organizations provide a wide set of services, and it is hard to describe
>> them consistently for searching purposes.  I think it is better to see the
>> SPD as giving pointers to service providers that the searcher can then
>> research more deeply using other mechanisms.
>>
>> Also, keep in mind that we do not currently vette organizations and the
>> more complicated the classification the more inconsistently it is likely to
>> be applied.  We already have the problems that service providers which to
>> list lots of countries where they are willing to operate while we really
>> want that field to indicate countries where they have existing staff on the
>> ground in an office.
>>
>> Best regards,
> 
> Many thanks for your answer Frank, it gives me some interesting information :)
> 
> Y.
> 

Yes, we should pick this up again. A suggestion was floated some time
back to mark those service providers who sponsor OSGeo with a barn
star[1]. This might also get us broader interest in sponsoring as
involved service providers can showcase their activity. It would also
allow us to reward those who do lots of in-kind contributions (e.g. SAC
folks) and thus are reluctant to pay cash to OSGeo as a sponsor.

Apart from this I guess it would be appropriate to add companies to a
map (hey, we are a bunch of mapping folks...) and maybe order the
languages and region section by name, alphabetically. Generally, would
people prefer to have the language in its own name as on the left of the
main web site or rather their English names? My preference tend to the
first.

Too many ideas, no one to do it. Sure. Thats why the SPD still looks as
it does... :-)

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars

-- 
Arnulf Christl
OSGeo President
http://www.osgeo.org