OSGeo site check

[Arnulf Christl]

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.