[Koha] Proposal to remove the 'Paid support' list

[Mirko Tietgen]

Tomas Cohen Arazi schrieb am 01.07.2015

> What is the benefit for people listed? I would say marketing
> and/or some SEO advantage (Liz told me there are counter measures
> applied so it is not used for SEO).

A place to send libraries to that are looking for support. A place
for (at best community-active) support providers to be found without
spending time on marketing. Apparently that does not work for some
parts of the world, where the market appears to be huge but people
contributing are very few in comparison.


[…]
> people are referring to being listed on the site as a way to
> certify their validation as service providers.
> 
> I think this hurts the project, because people tend to trust some
> quality degree is assured if companies are listed, which we
> cannot certify; and also makes community members spend a lot of
> time reviewing people's sites, with try/error iterations very
> often [1].

Agreed, this has to stop.


> I propose we replace the current listing with (a) nothing or (b)
> some pie diagram with companies/institutions contributions (git
> log, or what best addresses the need) to the project.

I want to work on Koha, not on advertising campaigns and SEO. I
think marketing is one of the evils of our time. I have been
promoting Koha as an idea and a library system for years before I
started to officially work as a support provider, but I won't print
newspaper ads or buy banners on Facebook (or whatever marketing
people do) to announce my services.

It would be nice if people could find out I am contributing stuff
without learning to understand bugzilla.

My proposal would be to have something similar to the »Patches
pushed for release« thingy on http://dashboard.koha-community.org.
Maybe a longer time span (like, people/ companies that have
contributed over the last year), but no »all time contributers« list
that would bring us lots of one time »contributions« for the sake of
being listed forever.

That would make it easy to see who has been active recently, and
that's all it says. No endorsement. Maybe with an option to list by
country. Maybe with a link to a website, maybe not. Information
specialists like librarians will be able to put a name into a search
engine. If they don't care about community involvement, so be it.

-- Mirko


--

Mirko Tietgen
mirko at abunchofthings.net
http://koha.abunchofthings.net
http://meinkoha.de



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