Have a platform *dependent* way of contacting author(s)

[hoijui]

As discussed in OPEN-NEXT/OKH-LOSH_copy#19, we do not and very likely never will have a platform independent way of contacting the author(s)/licensor(s) directly from the OKH data. What would be practically achievable though, is to have a platform dependent way of contacting, say:

• link to users profile page on thingivierse
• email of git authors or issues page for github, gitlab, gitea & co.
• ...

So.. this is kind of a request for discussion of whether we want a new field called ... okh:contact or the like. And whether it should be mandatory. I would say: yes, mandatory.

Summary

Proposal: okh:contact, type: URL, cardinality: 1+, required: yes, content: email, telegram (person|group), platform contact page, github/gitlab issues page, ...

[moedn]

not quite sure about this… of course it's beneficial to be able to contact the originator, but:

• if the they choose to share their contact details with the world wide web, they should do so in the original repo; I feel that contact sharing goes beyond the scope of OKH
  • it's a general concern; not sure if the manifest file would be the right place to share the contact details and having the same data in multiple locations (unsynced) is generally a bad idea :)
  • btw some licenses already include contact details, such as MIT
• anyone can create manifest files, so I don't expect a consistent use of this field

[hoijui]

I did not think of having it as a (TOML) manifest entry, but rather only in RDF, and generate it while crawling. Having it really mandatory though, would mean we would exclude platforms/projects that really leave no way of contacting, which.. I can not think of any right now, but to some extend makes sense to me. Then again, we could also decide to not make it mandatory.

[hoijui]

In the meeting we had this morning, @moedn and me came to the conclusion, that this makes sense as an RDF-only info, created by the crawler, but not manually definable in the (TOML) manifest. It should also not be mandatory, as for not to exclude platforms that may not support this at all, or alternative (non krawler based) ways of coming up with the RDF data, which might not be able to supply this.