[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo WebCommittee looking for a knowledgable resource

[Jo Walsh]

dear Daniel, webcommittee,

I hope you don't mind my moving this thread here, I wanted to offer a
public response, but not spam the broader discussion with it.

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 05:53:56PM -0600, Daniel Brookshier wrote:
> Anyone here have any experience setting up and running an open source  
> or commercial blog server or RSS aggregator site? 

You need to differentiate 'blog server' from 'RSS aggregator'. The
point of having RSS feeds of blogs is they can be collected from
different places on the web and viewed in one place. http://wordpress.com
provide a great free hosted service, and their open source package is
a 5-minute setup job. 

I briefly mentioned on IRC, the reBlog package, http://www.reblog.org/
 
[[ 10:10:34 dbrookshier: primarily is creating a sort of community
page that has an agragate of blogs and lets an editor feature blogs ]]

It fits this description exactly; i don't know of anything else that
does so well (these kinds of features tend to be 'hooked in' to
all-embracing CMS packages like drupal and plone, which all have
blogging facilities, too).

But I have acquired a new mantra, "focus on needs, not tools", and
have use case questions. This isn't an attempt to be formal about it,
but an attempt to gain clarity about your question.

* What kind of people within OSGeo are asking to create blogs? 
* What kind of communication forum will a blog aggregator provide? 
 * Is it meant to facilitate internal collaboration and awareness?
 * Or is is meant to be more public facing?
* Will this just be for "official" Foundation news? 
* Will it be a broader collection of people who are involved in 
open source geospatial, a more specific http://planet.spatiallyadjusted.com/? 

> We are looking for other options and and hoping that one of you could help us.

> If you have, please email me directly at dbrookshier at collab.net

The purpose of starting the informal Infrastructure Working Group
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Infrastructure_Working_Group 
is to get a sense of the community's needs for tools, and what kind of
infrastructure people are expressing a need and a preference for.

It would be really helpful if you could document any suggestions that
you receive privately on the wiki; the answers to the use case questions 
I ask above are also totally appropriate material to go there. 

Next time you have web infrastructure specific questions, perhaps you 
could ask for the replies to go to this whole list, not just your personal 
collabnet email address?

best regards,


jo