Mention how to suggest entries to the directory

[waldyrious]

Both the title and the contents of the "join" page are aimed at people directly linked to the open companies who might want to join the initiative. On the other hand, if someone knows about a company that seems to fit the definition, but doesn't otherwise have any connection to them, there is no apparent path to suggest such an addition to the directory.

To fix this shortcoming, I suggest adding short sentence at the bottom of the "directory" page, saying something to the effect of "Do you know of a company that you think should be on this list? If so, direct them to the join page, or submit a suggestion here."

I understand that an issue suggestion may not work well with a pledge model, so other ways to implement a path for non-company members to participate in building the directory (e.g. rewording the text of the "join" page to be more inclusive) would also be acceptable in the terms of this request.

[kyzh]

@waldir your are asking two things here. Creating another issue about non-company members would be better.

Feel free to fork and send a pull request with the added text to https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/blob/master/_i18n/en/join/index.md Then ping @opencompany/translators when you are done so the can do _i18n/*/join/index.md

[waldyrious]

Rather than proposing specific changes, I was actually looking for some feedback regarding what would be the best way to allow non-members to contribute to the directory, since the current process relies on the companies themselves taking the initiative to adopt the pledge.

For example, besides the options I mention above, other possibilities could be:

• having a "staging area" or an "unconfirmed" state in the directory, where we could list companies that have been suggested by other users and have a clear chance at being included (e.g. an "openness" page espousing values such as transparency, etc) but who haven't yet explicitly declared their stance regarding the pledge. The companies in this state could have their logos show up slightly faded out, for instance. In this case, the "join" page would have to be renamed to something more generic such as "add a company" (to clarify that both company employees and non-employees could do that).
• Having a clear process for inclusion involving creating a label (say, "suggested entries" or something to that effect) for issues in this repository, and only moving such suggestions after the companies comment on those issues confirming their adherence to he pledge; in that case, this process would be documented in the "directory" page instead, and the "join" page would remain unaltered.

So, my goal with this issue is to collect the opinions of the collaborators in this repository regarding which of these proposals (the two above and those I mentioned in my first comment) would make more sense for this project, and after we reach agreement, we could then implement the changes in the code.

[waldyrious]

Well, since there seems to be a bottleneck in adding new companies (by the companies themselves!) and making the list more complete, I decided to start a community-curated list, inspired by the recent trend of awesome-x lists. It lives at https://github.com/waldyrious/awesome-open-company.

I'd love to hear feedback from people currently or previously involved with the OCI, namely (from the list of contributors) @whit537, @kyzh, @timothyfcook, @galuszkak (@opencompany/owners?) about whether that list makes sense (perhaps as the "staging" area I suggested above) and any changes you would suggest.

[galuszkak]

@waldyrious you probably missed this: https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/145 .

I'm not sure how we structure members. For example there is Red Hat. But can we put Red Hat by ourselfs? Also I think @whit537 wanted to link membership with payments (ofcourse PWYW). If we want full open directory of open companies how we select them. They don't do any pledge so that is I think second problem... We need to figure this out somehow. :)

Anyway :+1: good job with this proposal. I need to think about rest of it.

[waldyrious]

@galuszkak I didn't miss #145 -- that's why I mentioned "currently or previously involved with the OCI". I assume the root interests are still present, just the association with this particular organization was cut. But I apologize in advance if the mention comes off as impolite or otherwise undesired.

As for putting members by ourselves, and linking membership with payments -- that's precisely why I felt it wasn't disrespectful to start a separate initiative, because I agree that the way the OCI is structured, it does make sense for companies to add themselves and take a pledge. At the same time I feel there's a need for a wiki-like directory that doesn't suffer from such bottlenecks in the mission to communicate the number and diversity of open companies out there.

To replace the effect of taking a pledge, I made sure to only include companies with an explicit commitment to openness and transparency (you'll see that the links aren't to their home pages, but to such openness/values/whatever pages), and intend to keep that as a guideline, unless there are reasonable arguments against that.

ps - to be clear, I am not suggesting to merge the list with the OCI or to have it affiliated in any way other than common goals (though I'd certainly be open to that --e.g. transferring the repo to the opencompany organization-- if you think it makes sense).

[waldyrious]

@galuszkak there are now explicit inclusion guidelines to ensure a minimum compliance with the open company ethos. What do you think?

[galuszkak]

@waldyrious we should definietly move some of those things to Open Company website. I'm just not sure with one thing. We have now blog. I would rather change blog to articles, and try to reuse that for more good. Or start working on something greater than jekyll like building our own website and host it somewhere (heroku maybe?). What do you think? We need this anyway for automate more process like sign-up company etc.

[waldyrious]

I would surely love to have this in the opencompany.org umbrella rather than as a separate list, but I strongly believe the community-curated aspect (i.e. a wiki-like, no-setup contribution workflow for anyone) should remain possible, as that's the reason I opened this issue in the first place. If that's what you have in mind, then I'm fully in favor :)

If, otherwise, opencompany.org wishes to only feature a list of copanies who have deliberately taken the OCI pledge, I understand the reasoning perfectly, and would then continue maintaining the community-curated list separately.