[ckan-discuss] CKAN credits

[Jonathan Gray]

I agree that having a minimal about page would be a good idea. Partly
as we have to think of the (perhaps not insignificant number of) users
who come to CKAN, don't really know what it is, what it is for or what
they can do there, and immediately look for some explanation or
'about' information. For these people the Venn diagram, the API links
and the explanation of VDM will probably not be a great deal of help.

This could include things like:

  * CKAN is a place to find material that is 'open' which means that
it can be freely reused and redistributed by anyone, for any purpose,
without restrictions.
  * A short, wide-ranging and easily comprehensible list of examples
of the kinds of things that can be found on CKAN, e.g. a database
showing the locations of postboxes, a large collection of German
literary texts in the public domain, a collection of transcripts of
what was said the in the parliament of country A between the years X
to Y, and so on.
  * Some very brief explanation of the broader vision behind this -
i.e. not just a directory where people look things up and go away, but
also a hub, somewhere to share updates and capture back better
versions, something to support the emergence of an ecosystem of open
data. Preferably avoiding any web 2.0 / social web type words or terms
(which may be opaque to people who don't follow spend time reading
about the web, and invisible or devoid of meaning to those who do).

Regarding translation, could we not start to foster more of a sense of
this being 'reference' page, from which people can take what they
think is useful? I think we should encourage people to write what they
want on this page about their own instance, and preferably have some
information/context relevant to the instance rather than the generic
information.

Regarding the credits, I don't think it matters where these go as long
as they can be found and they are relatively prominent. I'd definitely
like to see a full list of our developers, designers, and anyone else
who has made a notable contribution.

My only point was that at the moment the list on ckan.net doesn't
include lots of people which it definitely should include - not just
people who have joined the team but people who should have been added
months ago! ;-)

Casual visitors to the site *will* assume that this is up to date, and
hence *will* think the whole team is Rufus, David, Nick and John.

J.

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:59 AM, David Read <david.read at okfn.org> wrote:
> Rufus,
>
> The About page definitely needs a rethink, but I think a much pared
> down one would be a very useful part of each CKAN instance. I'd say it
> just needs:
>
>  * a section about this particular instance e.g. "This is Zimbabwe's
> official open government data ..."
>  * a snippet about CKAN - first couple of sentences from existing page
>  * OKFN is behind it (no need for names here)
>  * See ckan.org for more info, user guide, to give feedback and full
> source code.
>
> I agree that the Venn diagram / philosophy of CKAN is best moved to
> ckan.org, and the API info should be in the user guide.
>
> David
>
> On 20 January 2011 09:07, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>> On 20 January 2011 00:21, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
>>> A small request to update the 'Contributors' section of the 'About'
>>> page to reflect the current CKAN dev/design/admin team, who deserve
>>> crediting for all the nice work they are doing. ;-)
>>>
>>> http://ckan.net/about
>>
>> In fact I strongly think we should remove that section on ckan.net --
>> this kind of info should now be on ckan.org as it is about who
>> contributed to the software.
>>
>> In general I think we are thinking about 'deprecating' the generic
>> about page that gets put up on every ckan instance as:
>>
>> a) this info is rather specific to *.ckan.net (i.e. other installs do
>> not require it)
>> b) it involves translation overhead
>> c) it can live on ckan.org with a link from the footer on ckan.net if needed
>>
>> Does this sound sensible or not?
>>
>> Rufus
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ckan-discuss mailing list
>> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
>>
>



-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
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