[tdwg-tag] LSID Sourceforge URL & LSID Best Practices

Hilmar Lapp hlapp at duke.edu
Wed Aug 26 20:21:24 CEST 2009


On Aug 26, 2009, at 1:31 PM, Roderic Page wrote:

> I vote we move it to a site that actually works, and is easy to use
> (i.e., not SourceForge).


To be fair, the site that doesn't work is lsids.sourceforge.net, not  
SourceForge. I don't know when you last checked but SourceForge  
meanwhile supports hosted applications for projects, including a  
MediaWiki, Trac, and several other nice things, that can all be nicely  
customized. SourceForge, unlike Google Code, also supports Git  
natively, along with Hg etc.

That isn't trying to say that Google Code isn't a clean and well- 
working code hosting site. But frankly I don't think the problem here  
has much to do with Google versus SourceForge, but rather with a  
combination of the following three:

1 - For the current site, someone chose to be fancy and use a Sf- 
custom WordPress application. Meanwhile Sf changed its support for  
that (it is now one of the hosted apps and has to be setup  
differently), and the person has moved on and doesn't have time to  
make this fix.

2 - TDWG finds the US export restrictions to which Sf.net is bound (as  
much as Google is) no longer acceptable, and hence has decided to move  
the project to its own infrastructure (which, as far as I'm aware,  
does not exist yet).

3 - Despite explicit offers of help (such as, from me more than half a  
year ago, and from several people in this thread), TDWG hasn't ever  
bothered to add those volunteers as project admin so they'd be  
empowered to actually deliver on their offers.

The first one is something that happens to all projects - people move  
on, hosting providers need to upgrade their technologies. It will  
happen again, and frankly the plans regarding #2 raise concerns as to  
how vulnerable the envisioned infrastructure will be to that.

The second is understandable in principle, but the rationale that's  
difficult to follow at least for me is why keeping the site  
unavailable w/o any kind of ETA and an on-going embarrassment to  
everyone regardless of country is somehow better than making the site  
available to everyone and the code a legal download for 99% of the  
Earth's countries.

The third one in my personal opinion is a reflection of the necessity  
for some culture change at TDWG that would allow the organization to  
actually harness its community, which I think has much more immediate  
potential and power than elusive hoping for more funding.

My personal thoughts, anyway. Flame away ...

	-hilmar

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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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