[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Policy for listing Evergreen support and service companies on the wiki?

[Dan Scott]

Hi:

Yesterday I was cleaning up some of the wiki pages while putting
together an application to the Software Freedom Conservancy. I noticed
that some of the FAQ entries were questions like "Do I have to be a
technical expert to run Evergreen?" with answers like "No, you can hire
a commercial company like Equinox to support your Evergreen system.". As
the range of companies offering services and support around Evergreen is
now broader than that, I replaced those links with a link to a new wiki
page:
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faq:evergreen_companies
which represents my totally-off-the-top-of-my-head list of companies
that offer support and services for Evergreen. 

I want to bring that page to the community's attention because I know
that there have been great pains taken by other software projects to
avoid the impression of bias towards any particular company, while also
trying to prevent companies that have no demonstrated expertise in the
software from creating a bad name for the software project as a whole.
For example, the list of companies that offer professional services for
PostgreSQL is here:
http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support but to be listed,
a company needs to fill out a form
(http://www.postgresql.org/support/newprof) and the application to be
listed will be checked against the posted policy for approving
professional service listings
(http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/ProfessionalApproval). The policy also
includes provisions for removing a listing.

I don't know if we need a formal policy or a standardized format like
PostgreSQL uses, but I think it's probably a good idea. I wanted to kick
off some discussion about it, though, and also invite companies that I
haven't listed to add themselves to the wiki page for now; let's keep it
to alphabetical order, with just company name and a link to your Web
site.

If I was to suggest some criteria for a policy for being listed as a
professional service provider, I would want to have each company provide
evidence of how they have contributed to the community - partially from
a demonstration of expertise perspective, and partially from trying to
answer the question: "What would be best overall for the Evergreen
project?" We can't stop companies from advertising their services
outside of the evergreen-ils.org domain, of course, but we do have the
ability to control where we direct would-be Evergreen users from the
official Web site.