That is a noble goal, and I support this goal, although I do not think that an organized soapbox is the right way to do this. The short little "here's the link to my homepage, oh and I work on this and that project" pages are great. Anything other than that is off limits in my book.
First, I don't recall Stefano proposing an organized soapbox.
Aaron, can you take a moment and take a peek at http://www.apache.org/~fielding/ and indicate specifically what you think should be on and off limits?
Overall, I would like to see this discussion move away from http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/straw.htm arguments (which, to be fair was in response to an argument which at best contained http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/pl.htm, and quite possibly could be categorized as http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/attack.htm ).
What I would like to see this discussion move towards is concrete and specific proposals and objections. And towards building consensus.
For starters, we have http://incubator.apache.org/whoweare.html . Now let's entertain the notion of augmenting this allowing each committer to specify (via a completely opt-in basis) with a single hypertext link to the page of their choice. As has been pointed out, this is not materially different that what has been in place on http://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html for quite some time.
If acceptable, then lets explore what guidelines we need to place (if any) on the content of pages and how such guidelines are to be enforced. Should the guidelines be different for on-site and off-site content?
I personally would advocate very minimal guidelines, if any, but would be willing to compromise if that would increase consensus.
Is there anyone out there willing to contribute specific proposals along these lines?
- Sam Ruby
