MS RFC 116: Listing of Service Providers on MapServer website

Date

2016-05-04

Author

Daniel Morissette

Contact

dmorissette at mapgears.com

Version

MapServer 7.0

Status

Adopted

1. Motivation

MapServer is developed and supported by a rich ecosystem of businesses and individuals around the world but we do not do a good job of promoting those service providers and making them easy to find by our users at the moment.

In this RFC, we propose a plan to address this by adding a Service Providers page to the docs/website.

2. Proposed plan

A new Service Providers page will be added to the docs/website as a sphinx source file, just like all the rest of the docs.

The service providers will be grouped in three categories. The descriptions below should make it relatively easy to determine in which group a given organization belongs.

Each qualified organization who wishes to be listed is responsible for adding themselves to the right category in the page through a pull request (or a direct commit in case of core committers). We are intentionally not going to provide instructions here for preparing the pull request as it is expected that a qualified service provider should have people on staff who can figure it out themselves. Yes, we intentionally try to keep the bar at a minimum level.

A PSC vote is NOT required in order to add a new service provider, i.e. any core committer can validate and commit the pull request (or their own entry) but in case of doubts or disagreements on the interpretation of the rules, the MapServer PSC will be the ultimate authority to resolve the question.

Organizations in each category are displayed in randomized order (except in the PDF docs which are static). However entries should be added to the source file in alphabetical order (for PDF docs purpose).

Note

The term “Core Committer” in this RFC refers to official source tree committers elected by the PSC following MS RFC 7.2 committer guidelines.

2.1 Core Contributors

Core Contributors are essentially the organizations that have one or more Core Committer and/or PSC members as part of their staff and who provide MapServer related services to customers.

To qualify, the Core Committers and/or PSC members must be directly employed by the organization and not simply part time contractors.

They get to add a 200px wide logo with a decriptive text outlining their qualifications and services.

2.2 Contributors

Contributors are organizations who provide MapServer related services and have one or more people on their staff who are well known in the MapServer community for their long term contributions to the project. Contributions are not limited to source code and can also be in the form of documentation, binary builds, active user support via the public forums, etc.

They get to add a 150px wide logo with a decriptive text outlining their qualifications and services.

2.3 Other Service Providers

Organization with MapServer expertize and providing services around MapServer can fit in this category. While proprietary solutions providers are welcome, we also expect organizations listed here to be providing legitimate services to users of the Open Source software as well and don’t want this to just become an advertizement board for proprietary products.

They get to add a 100px wide logo with a decriptive text outlining their qualifications and services.

2.4 Refreshing the service providers list

If at some point (every 2 years?) we feel that the list is or might be no longer current, we could bring it up to date as follows:

• create a github ticket dedicated for the refresh

• send an email to the list with this message “in 4 weeks, we are going to remove all currently listed service providers to refresh the site. If you are still interested, add a note to ticket XXXX”.

Instead of the ticket we could just ask to reply to the email but the advantage of the ticket is to generate less email traffic for those not interested, plus it leaves a trace of the list of organizations who responded in a single place inside the ticket.

3. FAQ

• Should we also recognize sponsors or organizations that are funding significant features in this page?

  • No, since this is a service provider page and not a sponsorship page. However if the organization in question is also offering MapServer related services they can be added to the relevant category. They just won’t get special status due to their financial contributions.

4. Voting History

Passed with +1 from DanielM, TomK, MikeS, SteveL, JeffM, SteveW, PerryN, OlivierC, JukkaR, TamasS, ThomasB, and StephanM