[QGIS-Developer] Projecta

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi Tim,

Wow, thanks for the very detailed answer.

On 24.06.18 10:46, Tim Sutton wrote:
> Hi Matthias
>
> Since a few months ago, we added custom domain supports to the
> ‘projecta’ app we have built. That lets us host all the projects on
> one server instance but each project registering a custom domain can
> specify their own project or group of projects to be what is seen when
> you visit that domain. So while in the past you would see a bunch of
> different unrelated projects, you now see :
>
> http://changelog.qgis.org -> goes straight to the QGIS projecta project
> http://changelog.inasafe.org -> goes to the projecta landing page for
> InaSAFE (which then lists a few subprojects of InaSAFE)
> http://changelog.kartoza.com -> goes to the generic landing page which
> any new project will be registered on
> http://???? -> more to come in future
Ah, perfect
>
> Although we built this platform based around the things we identified
> as useful for QGIS, we planned to make it generic enough that it can
> be used by other projects, with eventually a monetisation scheme
> (which QGIS will be exempt from) whereby we will charge a small
> transaction fee on donations, sponsorships, certificates etc. passing
> through the system. We already spent a LOT of time and money on
> building the platform and would like to have it funded so it can be
> sustainable into the future. The monetisation will be on top of the
> stripe commission fees which to participating projects will probably
> mean around an 8% overhead on transactions coming through the
> platform. That is more than the do-it yourself stripe approach but we
> feel the convenience of the platform makes that a good value proposition.

First, thanks a lot! The platform is extremely valuable and fills a
missing gap in the project. I'm glad to hear you have plans to build a
sustainable business model around it. If that helps to make it grow and
pays for its maintenance, that will improve the product.

>
> Everything is projecta is open source so QGIS could conceivably run it
> on its own infrastructure if you decide you don’t like something we
> are doing….and Richard already knows how to get an instance up and
> running….its not too hard.
While that certainly sounds interesting, that's not the discussion I
wanted to trigger here ...
>
> Richard has already done an integration to automate the sponsorships
> going into projecta to appear on the QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org>
> sponsors page (via a feed that we provide on projecta for sponsors).
> We can do this because sponsors can be shown to users as static content.
>
> Likewise for the changelogs there is a feed to grab them from projecta
> and (with a bit of massaging from Richard) incorporate them into
> QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org>. We probably want to keep this workflow
> because a) static pages are nice :-) and b) once in sphinx the
> changelogs can be translated using the same workflows as the rest of
> the site.
>
> Certification is on projecta and I can’t see it going to a static site
> right now - In the future maybe when we have views for ‘upcoming
> courses near you’ and ‘find a training centre’ etc. we could probably
> pull these over but even that probably isnt worth it. We could
> probably tweak projecta to allow custom domains for a project’s
> certification page (e.g. https://certification.qgis.org).


Having Sponsorship and Changelog as static content (mirrored) and keep
certification dynamic sounds like a good plan.

Having either a proper subdomain like proposed here and/or (if not
feasible quickly) move the whole QGIS project to something like
project.qgis.org which is generic enough to serve for all the subparts,
that would be great. Especially since the main landing page for the
changelog is not projecta but the mirrored content on the qgis page, it
would be good to move things to a different subdomain. It would also be
nice to have a link on top of
http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/version/3.0.0/ etc. that links to the
mirrored page, once it's there, so people landing on the projecta page
will be redirected to a translated and updated site on qgis.org.


The most important question I wanted to raise here is, how can we make
sure that customers landing on the certification page respect it as a
trustworthy platform. Things that come to my mind here

- Having another subdomain than changelog.qgis.org

- Having SSL (signed with qgis.org)

- Having a page design that matches qgis.org

- Having a link from qgis.org


> The same for the lessons platform we build
> (see http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/section/list/ for all the new
> training materials we have been developing for QGIS) - we could be
> pulling this over to QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org> as static content and
> then incorporating into translation workflows there. We have also a
> translation framework for lessons on the platform, but it probably
> won’t scale well for many many languages.

Wow, that is looking good! It would be great to advertise this more!


>
> SSL is on our roadmap for projecta,
>
> We are also going to be rebranding it soon as http://prj.app (nothing
> to see there yet) with an on ramping process to make it easy for new
> projects to sign up.
>
> We would be happy to tweak things to include custom domain support for
> other parts of the app e.g. http://lessons.qgis.org. There are also
> other interesting things that we built on the platform that never
> really got used - especially the quorum tool which lets you form teams
> in a project, make and record decisions (pre-dated loomio) and has a
> concencus model built in.
>
> For QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org> I would suggest to generally keep
> things as you have it - pull static content onto the site and use
> projecta as backend where you prepare content. It is a ‘safe’ way to
> manage things since once content is static, there isnt much that can
> go wrong and we trade a few moving parts in the content preparation
> phase for basically no moving parts in the content delivery stage.
Cool, not much to add from my side. I'm generally happy with the process
as long as a visitor can easily see where the "authoritative" version is
located and whenever the "authoritative" version of a framework is on
prj.app it appears trustworthy for a visitor.
>
> Hope that sheds some light on the big picture view of things from
> project’s side - and hopefully those with other published software
> will consider using Prj.app in the future to benefit from all the
> stuff we have built for QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org> and to help support
> us in maintaining the platform….

It does, this platform has a big potential for QGIS but also for other
projects.

Best regards

Matthias

>
> Regards
>
> Tim
>
>
>
>>
>> Thanks
>> Matthias
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>
> —
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *Tim Sutton*
>
> *Co-founder:* Kartoza
> *Ex Project chair:* QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org>
>
> Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open
> source:
>
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>
> *Skype*: timlinux 
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>
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