Hi all,
Great discussion so far! I just wanted to respond to a few
points/questions that were raised.
I would be interested if a specific incident brought this issue to the
forefront or if this is just a general concern. (i.e., are we pre-emptively
solving a problem that hasn't happened, or are we addressing a situation that
has?)
No, there wasn't a specific incident. I was on the page and, as I often
do when I'm on the Evergreen wiki, I was inclined to clean it up so that
the information is relevant for anyone looking for a service provider.
After checking some web sites, I noticed there were some providers that
don't mention Evergreen as a service, and it wasn't clear what kind of
Evergreen services they were providing. I think some providers could
probably be removed, but I would be hesitant to do so without community
guidelines in place to help with decision making. These guidelines would
give us something to point to for those times when we may need to remove
a provider so that it doesn't look like we are just picking on one company.
I personally would not want to see too much vetting from the community,
but I think we can all agree on a minimum standard that anyone listed on
the page should be providing some service related to Evergreen.
Annual reregistration: The Koha guidelines provide a provision for this
- "From time to time, the Koha webmasters may check vendors to see if
they currently offer services. If a company no longer does, their entry
may be removed. All removals will be posted publicly to the Koha
mailing list." I think a similar policy could work for the Evergreen
community. It isn't as labor intensive as coordinating an annual
reregistration, but does provide some sort of process for removing
vendors if they move on to other projects. I don't think this process
necessarily needs to be in the hands of the web team. I tend to visit
this page on a regular basis and would be willing to watch out for
vendors that have moved away from Evergreen.
References: I'm not a big fan of collecting references or doing much
vetting beyond verifying that the company provides Evergreen services of
some sort. I think additional vetting would put the community in a
position that is close to endorsing a set of vendors. I don't think the
community should get into the endorsement business. As others have
already mentioned in this thread, the customers should be the ones who
ultimately check on references and do their own vetting.
Defining Evergreen services: I'm open to not defining what an Evergreen
service is and to see how it goes. My personal preference is that
Evergreen support providers not be confused with third-party services
that integrate with Evergreen, even if that third-party vendor needed to
learn a lot of the code to get their service to work with Evergreen.
Using Rogan's example, I don't think people come to this page looking
for blue tooth scanners, so those vendors shouldn't be listed on this page.
I like Grace's idea of a separate page with third-party services/devices
that work with Evergreen. I liked the idea even better when she said
she would be willing to maintain it, since I'm guessing it will take
quite a bit of time to keep up to date.
Kathy
