[ckan-dev] Authors / maintainers

Wed May 30 11:46:27 UTC 2012

Some thoughts about dataset author/maintainer.

(1) While it might be useful for some cases, it seems just confusing
having these two fields by default. I would suggest instead that the
default be to have one field ('Maintainer'), with an option to add
extra maintainers (in the same way as one adds extra fields).

(2) At present there is no maintainer (/author) until you go to the
'further information' tab and type it in. I'd like to see a checkbox
when the data is created called 'I am the maintainer of this dataset',
which autofills my details in as the main contact (assuming I'm logged
in).

(3) If a dataset has no resources the resources list currently says
'(none)'. Here is a suggested improvement: 'There are no data
resources here yet. For information about this data, contact the
dataset maintainer.'

The idea of (2) and (3) is to make it as easy as possible for someone
holding some data to make a minimal useful dataset for it. For
whatever reason, they don't want to put it online at the moment, but
they can still register the fact that they have it in about a minute
by creating an empty dataset for it.

Any thoughts? I can make this a ticket if there aren't howls of protest.

-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
CKAN on Twitter: @CKANproject