I have no real understanding of business (as will become obvious), but $10 a year strikes me as a bad idea:
1. It's a tiny amount of money, which implies the service itself isn't worth much. Organisations are used to paying big license fees, and individuals will happily stump up $US99 per annum for services such as Dropbox. Asking $10 makes it seem trivial (especially as, unlike domain name registration, there's no economy of scale for TDWG)
2. It closes the possibility of a market for these services, in the sense that $10 isn't an incentive to get others involved (which I think is ultimately what you want). If people's commercial livelihoods depended on this stuff, we'd stop faffing around and get solutions up and running.
3. Any exchange of money implies a commitment to service, which requires resources, which TDWG doesn't seem to have, so the cost of the service will have to cover that commitment.
Perhaps I've misunderstood, and the service is just the DNS SRV record, but it think if you're going to talk about money you want to think about providing more services, to take the hassle away from providers. There should be the option of on-site, drop in installation, and help for big players, and simple, easy to use tools for smaller providers.
Regards
Rod
On 27 Apr 2009, at 23:25, Dave Vieglais wrote:
I'm not sure if anyone has suggested this strategy (I'll be surprised if not):
TDWG seems determined to use LSIDs for GUIDs, yet the technical issues for implementation are discouraging enough for some to defer deployment. Perhaps TDWG could offer as a bonus for membership (or perhaps a small additional charge) the provision of some elements of the LSID infrastructure stack, overloading the tdwg.org domain?
Then, instead of having each institution create DNS entries such as "mydepartment.institution.org" and deal with the SRV details, use TDWG as a kind of registrar and do something like "mycollectionid.tdwg.org". TDWG would then be responsible for the appropriate DNS SRV registration, and could even operate a resolver and/or redirection service for that domain.
The income would not be very much (say $10/year per org * 100 participants = $1k), but it should be a lot less expensive for the entire community than the total cost for each organization operating their own infrastructure (perhaps $10/year DNS + $1000/year operations
- 100 participants = $101k).
So as not to overload the TDWG infrastructure, it would be sensible to encourage technically astute groups (e.g. GBIF, EoL, NCEAS) to contribute computing cycles and fallback DNS services to ensure reliability of the entire system.
The end result could be a reliable, distributed infrastructure for LSID (or whatever GUID scheme is decided upon) resolution that conforms to the requirements / specifications derived from the TDWG procedures at a small cost for participation. The low cost and deferral of technical overhead to a knowledgeable group would hopefully encourage participation by a broader audience in this piece of fundamental architecture.
(It may also help reduce the endless cycles of discussion about GUIDs and LSIDs)
Dave V. _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
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