Another one of those "larger ecosystem" things I'll be pushing on.
If you recall the legacy OpenOffice.org project had a webpage that listed various consultants who provided services for OpenOffice. We took it down because it was very out of date and we didn't have time (at that time) to figure out the policy implications and update the content. Well guess what? I have time now. ====> A draft of a proposed approach is on the wiki here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Draft+--+Apache+OpenOffice+Consultants+Directory <==== I'm working on the XSLT script now. Looking good so far. If you read the wiki you'll see the policy implications are minimal: We'll be fair and accept all relevant submitted listings, provided they don't abuse ASF trademarks, I don't think we need more than that, but adding more is certainly easy enough. Note also the disclaimer on the wiki, which I'll repeat here. As a non-profit we need to be careful about how we intersect with commercial activities. I think this is sufficient, but changes are easy to make. "Disclaimer: Although most individual users are able to download and use Apache OpenOffice without any help, or with the assistance of volunteers on our Forums and mailing lists, some users, especially corporate users, may have more complex requirements that require commercial services in order to optimize their deployments. The following individuals and firms offer services that may be of interest. The information provided here was provided by the entities named here, and is not verified or endorsed by the Apache OpenOffice project. We offer these listings as a service to the ecosystem." If there are no objections to this general approach, I'll proceed as follows: 1) Write up a definition of the requirements for the input XML file. XML Schema and plain English definition, for use by consultants submitting us listings 2) Draft a webpage giving info on how consultants can submit a listing. Would list technical and policy requirements. 3) Complete XSLT scripts and get them checked in. 4) Get this all onto the website into a test directory for review. Perhaps we seed it with initial data from project members who provide services, so we have something at launch time other than fake data. 5) Once approved, we go live. The legacy project buried this under the "support" page, but I think we should offer a more prominent location, perhaps a link on the home page. 6) Promote via blog, social networking, etc. 7) PMC reviews incoming submissions, etc. Routine maintenance. Note: this same approach (Submission instructions page + XML/XSLT to generate user-facing XHTML page) would also work very nicely for a CD Distributor listing page. It should be possible to copy this approach, including the XSLT script, even including this note, and with some modifications reuse it for that purpose. Regards, -Rob
