I think this sounds extremely fair - but I think we need a bit of an explanation for why companies are listed as such. While the community will understand the ordering - people who are new to open source often have trouble understanding the roles we assign and what that means to the community. I have been altering my 'Intro to Open Source' talks to include community definitions and governance to try and better educate librarians - but I can't be all over the world :) Anyway, my point was that we might want a page explaining the community role in open source and the reason the page is ordered as it is. I also agree that most people are going to want to find support companies based on where their libraries are located. --- Nicole C. Engard Open Source Evangelist, LibLime (888) Koha ILS (564-2457) ext. 714 nce@liblime.com AIM/Y!/Skype: nengard http://liblime.com http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/ 2009/5/9 Rachel Hamilton-Williams <rachel@katipo.co.nz>:
HI All,
After some thought, I have a suggestion for how to order the the listings on the pay for page which I hope is both fair, accurate, has longevity, and is useful to the people visiting the page for whom we're providing the info.
In the past we've ordered by region and we've ordered alphabetically. At the moment the suggestion is to order by date joined and I don't think that's a good idea (see below for why).
FIRST 3-4 PLACES
I'd like to propose that the first "3" positions (possibly more but no more than 4), be ordered by current release manager position held in the community, and that after that, depending on how many listings we have, they be ordered by region & alphabetically.
I'd like to see the first position on the list be given to the current release manager's company (Lilime ATM). I think that the job of current release manager is huge, and that the company who is currently providing the resources/employment of the release manager deserves all the support and credit we can give, even if they joined yesterday! I agree with Josh that there can seem like not much benefit to being the release manager (or being their boss!), and so this seems to me like a "no brainer". ALSO if I was a library wanting to get some development done then that's the first thing I would want to know, and lets face it, we want to encourage those libraries who DO want development done.
The second position on the list would be given to the current release maintainer- ie the release manager for the current stable release (Bib Libre ATM). Again, I think this is a big job, they are still doing a lot of patching, answering a lot of questions on lists and generally putting in a goodly amount of time and effort getting the current release more stable, mostly I'm sure not directly funded. Again I think that supporting the company that is providing the resources for someone to do this job is the least we can do. It again would mean that a library was "buying into" the idea of supporting the current stable release.
The third & fourth positions on the list could be to either the immediate past release maintainer (in our case v 2.x - assuming they are a different company), or the next company providing the most tangible support to the community.
I think however that we stop this system after the top 3-4 positions, because it is less useful after that. It may be that when there is a KSF (or similar) there are some other positions which because of the amount of work they entail, justify giving this same privileged to their supporting company in which case we can extend it, and have clear rules around it too.
I quite like the idea of the immediate past release managers being listed (ie if they have stopped being current and aren't funding another release themselves), because again being release manager is such a big job, I think they deserve recognition beyond their "active term" - and it kinda means they get a guaranteed "cash in" time for all that hard work, even if they need to pass the torch to someone else for the next release and concentrate or just building their own business.
REST OF THE LIST
THEN thinking about our actual website users, I imagine that what they mostly want is to see who supports their area, so I'd like to see the list split into countries or regions, ordered alphabetically, and with the vendors listed alphabetically within them, including info on contributions, positions held etc, if they are on/members of a KSF or similar. It may be that we get big enough it's worth having the company who supports or is principle sponsor of the local usergroup get first position in that grouping - but that's a bit down the track.
WHY - well I think it's easier to read and understand, and to re-find a company that way.
It will also make it easier to split up the list into "sane" chunks if it gets to big for one "page". Ie it's pretty easy to have a North America page, a South America page, a European Page, An African page, an Australasian page etc in the future, and will make more sense to the libraries trying to use it I think that having a "started in 2005" page.
WHY NOT BY DATE
I don't think that date joined is the best way to actually indicate who is a good company (or person) to deal with, and date joined is no inherent indicator of current involvement in a release, or even that the company would be a good choice for getting the current release installed & supported.
Katipo is a prime example of why not list by date (Even before selling to Liblime), we had not funded a release manager for a few years, and hadn't as a company been able to afford much official involvement in the project, even though individuals still participated. I don't think that it would be fair particularly, for us to be top of a page when others were doing so much more (and indeed we listed alphabetically in part to avoid that temptation).
While at the moment, the longest involved (listed) companies are at the top of the page, I would would like to see us have a policy that effectively achieves the same thing because I think those companies should be at the top of the listings, but is "defensible", and understandable for both libraries and vendors, and that allows for other worthy companies in years to come to also get a spot in the sun if they put in the hard yards like these guys have.
Cheers Rachel
-- ----------------------------- Rachel Hamilton-Williams General Manager Katipo Communications Ltd
Phone: +64-4-934 1285 Mobile: 021 389 128 E-mail: rachel@katipo.co.nz Web: www.katipo.co.nz
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