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.

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.

Foundation sponsors will be currently active foundation sponsors, and presumably a small icon indicating the sponsorship level would be shown beside them.

Project contributors are to be determined by the project steering committees by what ever means a given project deems appropriate. This might be organizations employing a committer, employing a PSC members, being a project sponsor, or any other criteria a PSC wishes. Projects would nominate organizations (or individuals) as contributors, and this would be used to "award" them contributor status.

Specifics on the mechanics still need to be worked out (here).

OSGeo's incubating and graduated projects

The aim is to attract commercial service providers as new contributors to projects, highlight existing contributors' services and make graduation attractive to projects (only graduated projects get full recognition).

Because certifications are a slippery slope 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.

What is a Service Provider?

Anybody from the single contractor to the multinational commercial enterprise can provide services for Free and Open Source Software. The range of services include any of the ones discussed in this chapter or any new ones that currently emerge.

Quality of Service

The Quality of a service provider is metered in quantifyable involvement in an OSGeo Project. There are several ways in which a service provider can get involved starting from being active on the mailing lists to becoming part of the core development team. As this might put additional stress on the Project Steering Committee of the corresponding OSGeo project this is optional and up to the discrietion of the PSC. But the additional load of work involved for the PSC should be compensated by higher attractivity to the potential service providers of becoming active.

How to apply as a service provider (SP)?

Subscribe to the mailing list
Introduce yourself to the communtiy.
Collaborate by providing help
Add yourself to the OSGeo Wiki

Depending on what services an SPD wants to provide she will have to produce some code or fix some bugs or add some documentation.

If an SP is interested in advertizing her training services she should consider contributing to training material. This will vary highly depending on which project you are working on. The following list provides an overview of what activity makes an SP gain which level of listing priority in the OSGeo SPD. 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 specified as one employee can only be in one place at a time.

Getting too complicated already? Yes. Then pls hack it and make it simpler.

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 power) points (max 7)

1 Regular training schedule

1 associate sponsorship

2 supporting sponsorship

3 sustaining sponsorship

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.
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, and employee count), as well as the whole list. The directory should be randomly ordered, so that no service provider gets top billing by virtual of when they registered.

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.

Implementation plan:

Will be implemented using the edit entry page

Online Link

This version has been implemented by Gupteshwar Joshi on the OSGeo Drupal server. The implementation is tracked in a Trac Ticket #47 and has been switched to the production server beginning of May.

Feedback

It would be helpful to have options under the 'Technology Expertise' list for 'Geospatial Servers' and 'Systems Administration'. It SEEMS these important services are in keeping with the goals of the directory.--Dougrenwick 19:27, 28 June 2007 (CEST)

The yellowish background color used to highlight some text is very garish! --Warmerda 20:45, 14 April 2007 (CEST)

Some tiny, one person, part-time consultants don't have websites so alternative means of specifying contact information would be helpful (e.g. email, or would a OSGeo wiki page be ok to create)?
- Consider adding a page to this Wiki with the one person, part-time consultant's name. It is both highly visible and searchable and if anybody thinks this is not a good idea tell them to discuss that on Discuss. --Seven 17:44, 5 May 2007 (CEST)

Perhaps a list of service types (e.g. end user application development, by language vs. data development vs. hosting vs. feature development) would help further differentiate providers. Change from "perhaps" to "must". I don't want to waste mine or anyone else's time turning down queries I'm not able or willing to provide.

Add coordinates to a searchable map. Add colored symbols to represent different service types --Seven 17:44, 5 May 2007 (CEST)

Service Provider Directory

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