Revision as of 14:01, 9 November 2007

Introduction

A frequent request of organizations wanting to use open source geospatial software, is for suggestions on individual consultants, or companies providing Commercial Services for the various software packages. In the past some projects have made an effort to list those offering services around the project, but a more holistic approach to this by OSGeo would be of substantial value to the projects, the service providers, and most importantly to the organizations looking to implement solutions.

However, maintaining a list of service providers is fraught with peril for OSGeo. It is important that we do so in a manner that is fair to the service providers (impartial), and aligns with the goals of the Foundation.

Prioritization

It was decided at the Board Meeting FOSS4G2007 that the Service Provider Directory should give searchers some guidance on which service providers are actually supporters of the foundation and projects. This helps searchers highlight the more involved service providers, and provides an incentive for organizations to support development and the foundation.

One common way to do this is by issuing certificates. This is a slippery slope and therefore OSGeo will implement an alternative way of documenting competency and involvement by leveraging existing structures. This results in multiple benefits for the potential customer, the service provider and also the software project.

Prioritization is envisaged to involve placing the high priority organizations at the top of the search result, and to result in some sort of icons placed beside the provider indicating they are foundation sponsors, or have been identified as project contributors for a particular project.

Currently active foundation sponsors and Project contributors will be listed higher up and highlighted with a small icon indicating the sponsorship level.

Examples

Links to how others go about this. This may educate us and help find the middle way.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,6856.0.html (just a list)
http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support (anybody can apply)
http://drupal.org/drupal-services (only contributors are listed)

General Rules

Project contributors are to be determined by the project steering committees by what ever means a given project deems appropriate. This needs to be discussed with the project leads so that they can work out any foreseeable trouble with their projects beforehand. Project contributors can be organizations employing a committer, employing PSC members, being a project sponsor, or any other criteria a PSC wishes. Criteria have to be worked out, published by the corresponding project and should be discussed and officially approved by the board prior to applying it. Then Projects will nominate organizations (or individuals) as contributors. The SPD management interface (tbd) would be used to "award" them contributor status.

Projects need to graduate before they are able to nominate organizations and individuals. This is to make sure that governance has been approved by OSGeo and PSCs are functioning correctly. Additionally it will be an incentive for projects to graduate.
PSC members are encouraged to nominate themselves (or their employing companies). Nominating oneself is a perfectly sound way of recognition.
Anybody from the single contractor to the multinational commercial enterprise can provide services for Free and Open Source Software.

Range of Services

Service providers can select a range of services that they provide. This helps clients to better identify a potential provider and will prevent specialized providers to be asked for services they do not offer. The range of services includes any combination or all of the following:

Installation, administration, support
Bug fixing, Maintenance
Customization
Core Development
Consultation
Architecture planning, Integration
Performance Tuning
Translation
Other services (explain)
Add your own services

How to apply as a service provider (SP)?

Subscribe to the mailing list
Introduce yourself to the communtiy.
Collaborate by providing help, etc. (see below)
Add yourself to the OSGeo Wiki
Request PSC for nomination

Level of Involvement

There are several ways in which a service provider can get involved:

Become active on the mailing lists
Write documentations
Translations (docs, interfaces)
Create Tutorials, educational material
Support systems architecture (OSGeo SVN, Trac, Mailing Lists, Web Site, etc.)
Become part of the core development team

Vetting these activities will put an additional workload on the Project Steering Committee of the corresponding OSGeo project. This should be compensated by the positive effects resulting from higher exposure and so on. This should be broadly discussed if required. The additional work for the PSC should be compensated by higher attractivity to the project to new collaborators and sponsors.

The following list provides an overview of what activity makes an SP gain which level of listing priority in the OSGeo SPD. Technical proficiency is measured by number and level of involved individuals. Companies are listed according to their sponsorship level and whether they provide regular training services.

Individual (technical proficiency) points (max 6)

1 Regular, active contribution to the user mailing list

1 Regular, active contribution to the user documentation (Wiki, Doxygen, Tutorial)

2 Regular, active contribution to the source code

1 Commitment to administrivia tasks (packaging, maintenance, bug fixing)

1 Membership in the PSC(?)

Company (financial) points (max 7)

1 Regular training schedule

1 associate sponsorship

2 supporting sponsorship

3 sustaining sponsorship

The spatial attribute (location of the SP) and language proficiency (which languages are spoken) are not controlled by OSGeo in any way but will have a high level of influence when it comes to spatial distribution. Therefore the number of staff available locally should be explicitly specified as one employee can only be in one place at a time.

Provider Details

WebCom maintains a service provider registry on the web site with the following attributes for each service provider:

Organization (or individual) name.
URL to service providers off-site web page with service details, etc. Tiny, one person, part-time consultants can add contact information to their OSGeo Wiki user page and link to that page.
A list of packages/technologies the service provider provides services for (from a predefined pick list).
A list of (human) languages the organization can provide service in.
A list of office locations (later with city/country with lat/long coordinates) for the service provider.
An employee count for the organization.
An email contact for the organization (not normally displayed - used for administrative purposes)
The date of last information update (not normally displayed - used for administrative purposes)

Vetting

Prioritization (see above) may give some directions as to how vetting can be institutionalized. Meanwhile the community will have to watch out.

OSGeo is a collaborative work place and information hub. It is essentially providing a mechanism for service providers to list themselves, but makes no specific effort to determine if the information they provide is correct.

In order to protect the OSGeo brand the community might "vette" entries which can involve discussions on public mailing lists or edits in this Wiki. It is therefore in the best interest of service providers to only provide correct information. Service providers are invited to discuss questions on the WebCom (or VisCom or Advocacy) list prior to adding information about their Businesses.

It is possible that OSGeo will need an official mechanism to deal with complaints about the accuracy/appropriateness of a directory entry. Not anticipating many complaints, currently WebCom (Website Committee) is responsible for preliminary negotiation of complaints. If the complainant or service provider is not satisfied then the issue can be escalated up to the Board of Directors. If this turns out to be a frequent problem OSGeo will develop a more streamlined procedure.

Disclaimer

OSGeo does not guarantee that the information provided by this directory are correct and has no mechanism to check or control them. Information is provided as is. If you find information to be incorrect please contact us through the feedback link at the bottom of the Service Provider Search Interface.

Web Display

The web page for the service provider directory is still under development. If you are interested in helping design the page please feel free to add comments at the bottom of this page. Ultimately the directory should provide means to query based on each of the attributes (packages, languages, location), as well as the whole list. The directory can be ordered following the Prioritization.

Implementation plan:

Search page with all possible fields
Facility to see complete list
As a result, entries with very basic information as Name, Technology and may optional short description will be displayed
Each entry will lead to some more specific details on new page for the selected provider.
In future, we may have some comparison page for some (possibly not more than some number) selected search results on some criteria (to start with only for technology and language support).
Or search result will have proper pagination and search page itself will have all the details included so no need to navigate for each and every result.

Updates

Entries should be updated annually. On or near a year from the last update, the contact address should be emailed, and the service provider encouraged to update their page - even if only to save it "as is" updating the last update date. Any entry not updated for 24 months should be dropped, and the contact notified by email.

This all assumes the entries can be maintained by a logged in user to the Drupal site, and that an entry, once created, would be "owned" by a drupal user.