[Bug 494940] Add "Professional Services" to project page
Bugzilla Link | 494940 |
Status | NEW |
Importance | P3 normal |
Reported | May 30, 2016 12:28 EDT |
Modified | Aug 18, 2021 05:55 EDT |
Description
It should be possible to list professional services (training and consulting) relative to an Open Source project of Eclipse Foundation.
Value for end users
When a user searches a supplier to support him in his professional usage of a specific project, there isn't any simple place to find a listing of such supplier. Often, Google is the most efficient way, not the Eclipse Foundation website ...
The normal workflow for an end user is to go to project website, and to search from there a list of pro services and suppliers. Today, the current workflow propose an "Active Member Companies: " chapter in the "Who's involved" section of a project page (such as https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/modeling.emf/who). But this chapter didn't describe if these members provide services. And some members provides services which could be useful, but they don't contribute to the project itself.
and to find competitors about the same project.
Value for committers
The ecosystem around an Open Source project is a real criteria of success. It is important for the project to be able to propose worldwide some trainers, onsite consultants, integrators, etc. Propose a choice between providers will help to create contributions, as it will stimulate companies to be involve in the project.
Committers will keep a full control of the project web page (www.eclipse.org/foo) to promote their name or their company's name as sponsor/contributor of the project.
Value for members
Being listed in this section should be restrict to only EF members (without any extra fees as it isn't an advertisement).
If it drives some business, it will be a good value to be a member.
To measure this value, EF could provide some google analytics metrics to show how many visitors goes to this commercial page thanks to this new link.
How to select listed "professional solutions"?
Each member can add by himself his company name for all projects he wants.
The leader of the project cannot modify the list of companies listed on this page. So, some of his competitors can be listed in a vendor neutral way.
To prevent some abuse, we should ask a description of each offers for each project. It will be a too heavy task to do it for all Eclipse projects. But in case of such abuse, it would be managed by EMO. One simple rule to verify the relevancy could be: "if I send you a service request for this project for next week, have you the skill to do it?".
The Eclipse Marketplace could be reuse to propose forms to select project / offers associated to a company login.
So, this form https://marketplace.eclipse.org/node/add/training should be refactored to allow several trainings and several consulting offers, and to associate a project.
Where to render this list?
It could be render in the "Who's involved" section, or in a new one called "Professional services". (TBD)
Description, name, logo and kind of service (consulting or training) should be easy to read without the need to go to a sub page.
The companies list should be organize with this order:\
- companies which are active (based by the same algo than the one currently used for "active member companies" chapter)\
- others (random order)
To apply meritocracy, perhaps we could imagine that this second list of "non active members" is hidden per default. TBD
As we already have the "location" field in the new training and consulting form, it could be possible to provide a hyperlink "find a supplier near my location" which redirect to a customized version of http://events.eclipse.org/ with all trainers and consultants.
Last, a new "professional service" section could be created in the project's marketplace page to provide similar information.