Company Classification

[dcramer]

Right now we have a marketing problem that's fairly evident due to the way we've approached this leaderboard thing.

It doesn't do a good job of "selling" the pledge, because its just showing an assortment of primarily indie companies. Those companies we still want to be part of the program, but at the same time we have to recognize that a lot of the websites job is to market the pledge to aspirational companies.

I propose a few things to help address this (these are not all my ideas):

1. Remove the leaderboard. Make it a curated set of logos. As we get more recognizable brands, we adjust it.
2. Highlight new members (this is a good way to give folks recognition for joining, whether they're small or large). This might be highlight everyone whos joined in the last N period.
3. $/dev is not a good metric (in general) and doesnt encourage big companies. While I applaud anyone giving $10k/dev, if someone comes in and gives $10mm total, vs someone elses $10k (for their only dev), we should recognize the value delta.
4. Find a way to classify indies/early stage in a way that makes them feel valued, but doesnt deemphasize from the reality that this primarily is successful from many larger companies joining. e.g. a company that stays at 3 developers is very different than a venture backed company that may be 3 today, 30 in a year, and 300 in 3 years. I'm not sure what terminology we should use here, but I think we should cleanly separate them into different categories, as we want the bigger/growth orgs to be the marketing/sell focus.

[dcramer]

To clarify, when i say remove the leaderboard what I mean is two things:

1) Remove it from the homepage 2) Focus less on the leaderboard concept and more a data explorer (but still not on the homepage)

[vladh]

We could change the homepage to show:

• a curated list of companies/logos, to show credibility/impact, and
• the e.g. 3 most recent companies, to incentivise joining.

On the Members page, we could move towards a Company Explorer by having three columns: number of developers, total donated, $/dev (all for the last annual report). We could allow the user to sort by whatever column they want. Not sure what the default sort should be.

[chadwhitacre]

I think with the changes we made yesterday in #124 and #127 we've largely resolved these concerns wrt the /members listing. For the homepage it's easy enough to drop the $/dev column and just show logos, I agree with that (we talked about that somewhere, I forget if GH or private Slack, probably the latter).

$/dev is not a good metric (in general)

Kinda late in the game to suggest this. What's the reasoning?

and doesnt encourage big companies. While I applaud anyone giving $10k/dev, if someone comes in and gives $10mm total, vs someone elses $10k (for their only dev), we should recognize the value delta.

Sure, that doesn't mean it's not a good metric.

[chadwhitacre]

a good metric

I think it's good but not enough, I think the direction we're going in #124 where we're moving /members more towards a data explorer is the right direction. $/dev is useful but needs to be looked at in context.

[chadwhitacre]

Remove the leaderboard.

We have not had a leaderboard per se on the homepage since https://github.com/opensourcepledge/osspledge.com/pull/104 when we started sorting by ndevs desc. With #135 the homepage is brought into line with what we have on /members as low-hanging fruit.

Make it a curated set of logos. As we get more recognizable brands, we adjust it.

The algorithm we have today is not bad. The largest company (by ndevs) is always shown, and each company after as a 50% chance of being shown on any given page load. I think this gives a good balance and naturally scales as we onboard larger and larger companies.

If we do want to change the presentation of member companies on the homepage even further, I'd like to bring in @stevenplewis.