[Web Comm] OSGeo web de-escherisation (was Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal to find an alternative to Collabnet)

[Tyler Mitchell]

On 17-Jul-06, at 7:09 PM, Jo Walsh wrote:
> One thing OSGeo is seriously missing is a sense of "membership"
> reflected in the web presence. Members need profiles, a way of
> identifying themselves and their allegiances, being contactable,
> putting themselves on a map. This could be a good angle to think about
> a "community site" from - become a registered member, become entitled
> to freebies, be able to set up a local group/interest group portal.
> This could provide a way to start channeling into news, events,
> activities, the stuff that it feels like the site is missing out on  
> now.
> www.osgeo can become a "community portal" or whatever you'd call it,
> can point to the project home sites, whether they stay on CN or on
> existing infrastructure or on something new that OSGeo would  
> provide if
> projects wanted that, it kind of doesn't matter that much.
>
> There are specialist OSS platforms for doing that sort of thing -
> http://www.civicspacelabs.com/ (drupal-based) comes to my mind
> foremost - even the livejournal codebase could be used for this!
> - and this is something that OSGeo could fundraise to support
> development and maintenance of. Getting this to talk to an LDAP
> repository, connecting to other OSGeo services, this could be
> trickier, but we have plenty of people who could help sort this out.

 From what I've learned about civicspace (and drupal), I'm encouraged  
by what they could do for our group.  The more I hear about the Open  
Source Labs (http://osuosl.org) folks and solutions, the more I'm  
impressed as well.  They sound like a great group to hook up with to  
deliver something like along the lines of what we need.

Jo, I know you've been in some contact with them.  I'd like to see if  
they could set us up with some demo space - I'd be glad to port over  
some pages/topics to their set up to help be a test case.  Can you  
tell us more about the services and stuff like quality of service  
guarantees, etc. that we could get from them?  Also, I'm wondering  
what kind of services such as site building/maintenance they can do  
for us.  And, of course, what the pricetag is. :)

What are others thinking about moving the front end of the osgeo site  
somewhere else?  I would like to see the core infrastructure being  
managed by someone who has it as their job, with us taking choosing  
and taking advantage of using the tools and loading in content. We've  
chatted a bit about this on IRC, but I just wanted to get the  
discussion out in the webcom world.

We need to decide *when* we have to move by, so that we have a deadline.

Tyler