[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen web page for paid support vendors

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi all,

Great discussion so far! I just wanted to respond to a few 
points/questions that were raised.

> I would be interested if a specific incident brought this issue to the forefront or if this is just a general concern.  (i.e., are we pre-emptively solving a problem that hasn't happened, or are we addressing a situation that has?)


No, there wasn't a specific incident. I was on the page and, as I often 
do when I'm on the Evergreen wiki, I was inclined to clean it up so that 
the information is relevant for anyone looking for a service provider. 
After checking some web sites, I noticed there were some providers that 
don't mention Evergreen as a service, and it wasn't clear what kind of 
Evergreen services they were providing. I think some providers could 
probably be removed, but I would be hesitant to do so without community 
guidelines in place to help with decision making. These guidelines would 
give us something to point to for those times when we may need to remove 
a provider so that it doesn't look like we are just picking on one company.

I personally would not want to see too much vetting from the community, 
but I think we can all agree on a minimum standard that anyone listed on 
the page should be providing some service related to Evergreen.


Annual reregistration: The Koha guidelines provide a provision for this 
- "From time to time, the Koha webmasters may check vendors to see if 
they currently offer services.  If a company no longer does, their entry 
may be removed.  All removals will be posted publicly to the Koha 
mailing list." I think a similar policy could work for the Evergreen 
community. It isn't as labor intensive as coordinating an annual 
reregistration, but does provide some sort of process for removing 
vendors if they move on to other projects. I don't think this process 
necessarily needs to be in the hands of the web team. I tend to visit 
this page on a regular basis and would be willing to watch out for 
vendors that have moved away from Evergreen.

References: I'm not a big fan of collecting references or doing much 
vetting beyond verifying that the company provides Evergreen services of 
some sort. I think additional vetting would put the community in a 
position that is close to endorsing a set of vendors. I don't think the 
community should get into the endorsement business. As others have 
already mentioned in this thread, the customers should be the ones who 
ultimately check on references and do their own vetting.

Defining Evergreen services: I'm open to not defining what an Evergreen 
service is and to see how it goes. My personal preference is that 
Evergreen support providers not be confused with third-party services 
that integrate with Evergreen, even if that third-party vendor needed to 
learn a lot of the code to get their service to work with Evergreen. 
Using Rogan's example, I don't think people come to this page looking 
for blue tooth scanners, so those vendors shouldn't be listed on this page.

I like Grace's idea of a separate page with third-party services/devices 
that work with Evergreen.  I liked the idea even better when she said 
she would be willing to maintain it, since I'm guessing it will take 
quite a bit of time to keep up to date.

Kathy