On 11/15/06, Cor Nouws <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: > also consider charging to be listed. The fee would be minimal and would > go to paying for sustaining the project. I think it is OK to ask a fee. After all, for busniness listed it is marketing. And they also can exist (partly) because OOo exists ...
I do agree that for businesses, it is realistic to pay some money for this marketing. I still have some open questions: * who decides on the policy ? I would assume that a policy (and certainly one that involves money), that will reject people from having their commercial entry on the central OO.o consultants page needs broad approval from the project. I would not be comfortable if such decision was made by just a few persons, coincidentally present in this thread. As a reference, look at the many entries on the consultants page itself. I believe at least a simple majority (50 %) of the "serious" OO.o consulting entities (of which many are not yet listed) should support any policy. Being present on a relevant OO.o mailing list might be a realistic way to filter the "serious" consultants from those entries that are outdated or simply not related to OO.o. The policy should also have support from the core developers (that have contributed code that is), because it is their work that is represented. * Which practical means of payment are accepted ? * paypal ? * credit card ? * money transfer bank-to-bank ? * cash in an envelope ? * ... * how large should the fee be ? * 10 EURO/year ? * 100 EURO/year ? * 1000 EURO/year ? * who will manage the process on a worldwide scale to : * send reminders for the yearly payment (inofficial "invoices") * follow-up received payments over 1 or many channels * send reminders if payment is not received in time * start a (public) bookkeeping * have this bookkeeping reviewed/audited * couple back the received payments to actual listing/delisting on the web site... Maybe all of the above is already present somewhere in the OO.oinfrastructure ? I would not propose a _one-time_ payment, since that defeats my original goal of having some method of keeping the list up-to-date (and that preferably with a fully automated process on a server that does not require human intervention). Thanks, Peter
