Hi, I am Peter Vandenabeele and new to this list. I am working on the improved adoption of Open Standards for document exchange (ODF et al.) in a Belgian government agency.
When looking at this page http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.html for "Belgium", I see a lot of bad links: * some web sites do not even resolve anymore to a working web site * some companies are not longer operational in Belgium (out of business) * some web sites do not even have the word OpenOffice or any relevant mentioning on the refered page (or on the web site that they are part of) * some only have an e-mail address available, while I would prefer a real web site. On the other hand, I miss a few names that I know have knowledgeable people and deliver services on OO.o in Belgium. I have not checked other countries, but I fear there may be similar problems (while 'fear' is typically not the best motivation to take decisions ;-) Below are a few proposals on how to improve the quality with a few very basic criteria for staying listed on the site: continuous automated checks: * the entry must resolve to a web-site (not an e-mail address) * the web-site must be up (not down longer than 30 days) * the web-site must at least mention some relevant keyword {OpenOffice.org|OO.o|OOo|StarOffice|ODF} (this avoids the "domain for sale" web sites and the "US company with US phone number, advertising for spamming software" to be counted as valid web sites, each of which category currently represents at least 1 out of the 8 or so Belgian entries ...) With these basic checks, dead or irrelevant links are at least basically purged. I find it essential that, to increase adaption of OO.o and ODF, the quality of also this aspect must be improved. Once the quality of this list is improved, also the more serious companies will be motivated to post their info on the list. The list will become a valuable place to be listed if you are a serious service provider in the OO.o space. I am willing to offer some private time to help on this. Since I used to have a consultant company, but don't have such a company now, I may be in a good position for that. Once a policy is established, some recurring checks running from any server, checking the listed entries and generating a monthly report, could already be a good start to track the entries adhering to a certain policy. But, first a policy must be in place ... I am not aware of a policy at this time (I have not searched very hard ...). HTH, Peter -- Peter Vandenabeele peter AT vandenabeele DOT com http://www.vandenabeele.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
