I think a commercial support section would be a great idea, but as
others have said, managing it can be tricky. Not all users know how to
analyze the list archives to find the best person to help them with a
specific problem, so this support page would help both the users and the
service providers to find each other.
I think David's suggestion of self-registration with a flag for
committers and some objective measures of contributions/participation
readily available may be the best way to go.
Daniel
On 14-08-21 3:48 PM, David Strip wrote:
As Frank wrote, this is a slippery issue. Personally I could be
comfortable with anything from self-registration to the highly selective
approach described by Frank. To me, the important issue is making clear
to a reader of the list what exactly the list means and how to use that
to interpret the skills of those on the list.
One way to use this list is as a reward to significant contributors to
project. This would tend to point to those most familiar with the
internals of the project, as well as having a broad commitment to the
project and the notion of an open source community. Of course this
requires a voting process, presumably by the PSC, which can be
burdensome and stressful, as Frank notes. While I have found this
project community to be generally welcoming, open source projects
somewhat deservedly have a reputation for being insular and hard to
crack. (For a great read, check out this article.
<http://www.infoworld.com/t/open-source-software/how-crack-open-source-community-248352?source=IFWNLE_nlt_stradev_2014-08-19>
Worth reading just for a remarkably intolerant response from Linus
Torvalds on the merits of C++). A vetted list of names carries an
implied endorsement, which is valuable to the reader, but carries a risk
for the committee that chooses the list. (I'm not talking risk in the
legal sense, though that could occur, I suppose. More the reflection on
how the community chooses who to include or exclude.)
As the other extreme, we allow anyone to register and hopefully provide
some guidance in how to choose amongst them. For example, suggest that
people search the archives of this mailing list to see how often the
consultant participates. Put a star next to names who have commit
privileges, perhaps the date the achieved this status, so you can tell
how long they've been active. There are many ways to objectively
identify the stronger contributors while remaining open. I am tempted to
suggest even allowing endorsements, but policing that against spam,
abuse, fraud is probably more work than it's worth.
My choice leans to an open list of self-registrants with some
/objective/ measures of their participation, but I'll probably be
content with whatever the community decides.
On 8/21/2014 11:02 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
Folks,
This is a somewhat sticky area, which is why I started just with just
the self-registration mechanism on the OSGeo site in the past.
A scenario that I could support would be a section somewhat like the
postgis.net <http://postgis.net> support list where being added to it
needs to be voted on by the PSC. My criteria as a PSC member would be:
- The organization has made significant contributions to the project
(in code, docs, etc)
- The organization has staff that I personally know to be competent
GDAL/OGR developers.
It is a slippery sort of thing of course. Subjective, and I would
hate to be in the situation where I'm having to vote against an addition.
If we were to pursue this I actually think an RFC with an initial list
of entries, and some general principles would be appropriate (though
additions wouldn't need an RFC - just a up/down vote).
My perspective when consulting was that being active on the mailing
list, and noting in my email signature that I was available for
consulting was enough to give me some profile with those looking for
someone.
PS. as happy customer of Even's (at Planet Labs) I can strongly
endorse him as a consultant!
Best regards,
Frank
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Daniel Morissette
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