[Webcom] [Live-demo] Proposal: OSGeo home page to link to OSGeo-Live Project Overviews

[Cameron Shorter]

I've dropped the OSGeo-Discuss from the CC (I don't think people are 
commenting from that list), and adding the OSGeo Marketing committee 
list (as it seems the Web Committee is Missing In Action).

OSGeo Marketing Committee members,
Can you please weigh in on whether you think it a good idea for project 
links from http://osgeo.org should point to OSGeo-Live project 
overviews. Vote +/- 1 would be good.

Hamish,
Regarding your question about OSGeo projects which are not on OSGeo-Live:
At the moment, all OSGeo graduated projects have a Project Overview page 
on OSGeo-Live. And I expect that we are likely to always have OSGeo-Live 
Project Overviews for graduated projects as the OSGeo Incubation process 
now includes a requirement to "Create marketing material such as for 
OSGeo-Live".

There is currently one OSGeo project in incubation, the OGC's CITE Test 
Engine, which doesn't yet have an OSGeo Live Project Overview.
My suggestion is that OSGeo graduated and incubating projects should 
reference the OSGeo Live Project Overview if it exists, otherwise point 
at the project's home page until the Project Overview is created and 
made visible.

Hamish,
Re "Which overviews are out of date":
I agree that the old overviews are probably reasonably close, but I 
expect they will not include recent features. Looking at the OSGeo 
Mapserver page, it states: "Supports popular Open Geospatial Consortium 
(OGC) standards including WMS, WFS and WCS"
While the OSGeo-Live page, includes support for a few more recent OGC 
standards: "WMS (client/server), non-transactional WFS (client/server), 
WMC, WCS, Filter Encoding, SLD, GML, SOS, OM"

I haven't looked at other overviews, but I expect to find similar 
deficiencies.

On 4/04/2013 2:45 PM, Hamish wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Cameron wrote:
>> OSGeo Web Committee,
>> Currently, there are a list of OSGeo projects at http://osgeo.org,
>> most of which link to an
>>   OSGeo page describing the project (eg http://www.osgeo.org/deegree). Unfortunately, these
>> OSGeo Project pages are not being maintained.
>>
>> I propose that instead the list should link to the OSGeo
>> Live Project Overviews, such as: http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/deegree_overview.html
> I don't feel strongly one way or the other about it, just
> to note that in the past months I've been pointing to the
> live.osgeo.org overview pages when mentioning a project to
> someone, in the same way that one might link to wikipedia
> when describing some thing or another. I think the live dvd
> overview pages fill that role quite nicely, and as Cameron
> mentioned they're kept reasonably up to date.
>
> maybe some apache server alias magic could cleanse the url
> strings to make it look like you are still at
>   http://www.osgeo.org/${project}_overview.html,
> if anyone cares about that?
>
>
> fwiw looking at http://www.osgeo.org/grass, I don't see much
> there that would go out of date very quickly or is calling
> out to be replaced by the live disc's overview page.
> Maybe other pages are lacking. Care to name names so we can
> fix them?
>
> how do you propose to deal with osgeo projects which are not
> on the live disc for some reason or another? (and that list
> of installed packages changes with time)
>
>
>> These Project Overviews are updated every 6 months as part
>> of the OSGeo-Live build process, and are written in a
>> consistent manner, with OSGeo branding.
>>
>> Note: A secondary option could be to link to the Project's
>> home page instead. I suggest that links to OSGeo-Live
>> Project Overviews are preferable due to the consistent
>> layout of the Project Overviews.
> either way, I'd stay with linking to a consistent summary page
> rather than the home pages directly, when the purpose of the
> link is to describe the project. (instead of say when the
> purpose is to download the software binaries in as few clicks
> as possible)
>
>
> best,
> Hamish


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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