[ckan-dev] Authors / maintainers

[Rufus Pollock]

On 30 May 2012 12:46, Mark Wainwright <mark.wainwright at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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).

>From conversations and experience over the year we should probably
just have Publisher (and perhaps Maintainer)

> (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).

I think we should at least see CKAN owner shown as "CKAN owner" in some way.

> (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.'

Agreed. These are the kind of UX tweaks that really should go into
tickes. We already have quite a lot of them ;-)

> 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.

Understood. This is more the catalog approach. I'm a little dubious of
its value unless I can do something else like "Request access to this
dataset". Having a bunch of datasets without any data reduces the
value of a given instance I think.

Rufus

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