[Webcom] Service Provider Directory - Prioritization

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

It was decided at the FOSS4G2007 Board Meeting that the Service Provider
Directory should give searchers some guidance on which service providers
are actually supporters of the foundation and projects. This helps searchers
highlight the more involved service providers, and provides an incentive for
organizations to support development and the foundation.

Arnulf and I have made a few back and forths working on a proposal for this
and I have moved my latest iteration to:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SPD_Prioritization

In theory we were hoping to decide on this at the board meeting friday
but I think the work is not very mature yet, and it has become clear
(from feedback in #osgeo today) that the broader community needs an
opportunity to provide feedback before we cast anything in stone.

This email is an attempt to broaden the audience *a bit* to get
some more feedback before I take the issue to the projects (via incubation
list) and general community (via osgeo discuss list) for feedback.

I've hacked things quite a bit since Arnulf last touched the page earlier
today, including preparing a bland "Frank style" mockup of how things might
look.  So don't blame anything on Arnulf, it's likely my lame-ness.

Some particular topics of controversy/discussion/uncertainty:

  * Do we want to provide detailed guidance to projects on how they should
    determine who is a contributor?
  * Do we want to to rank contributors against each other ... ie. to work
    out who contributes more and put them ahead of other contributors?
    (my current proposal just lists contributors randomly ahead of
    non-contributors)
  * Do we want some sort of nicer "iconic" or visual way of representing
    contributors instead of my lame textual listing?

There is also, obviously, the issue of who will take care of the update.
Arnulf has indicated that he or affiliated WhereGroup folks might do
the update to the SPD application (a bit of php/database stuff in Drupal).
If that is not practical now, I imagine I can convince Gupteshwar to do
the update.  This upgrade might also be an opportunity to generally
improve the visual appeal of the SPD application, and improve the management
tools available (some way for administrators to fix/review/disable entries!)

I'm currently emailing this to webcom and the board since webcom, at least
in theory, is responsible for the SPD and to the board since it initiated the
updated, and needs to approve the general plan (because of strategic issues
involved).  But I appologise for cross posting.  I hate it. At times like this
I wish for the uber-email-cloud that gets to all the people who care, and no
one who doesn't and that has no subscriber-only-post rules, etc.

Perhaps we can discuss further at the Friday board meeting even if we aren't
quite positioned to finalize.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org