A few months back we introduced the newly revamped and automated Professional Services listings. The listings are divided into two categories - Active Contributors, and Additional Organizations. We've had a few queries on how organizations get assigned to these categories.
Here are some criteria that come into play when we decide where to place an organization. We tend to look at activity for the past six months and give that a lot more weight.
- Be an active forum participant and have a certain number of forum replies / month helping others
- Be an active IRC participant. Help other folks on a regular basis and participate in technical discussions
- Help organize regular meetups in your location. e.g. NY, DC, Boston, London, Dallas meetups.
- Help organize and sponsor trainings, code sprints and CiviCon conferences.
- Sponsor and continued development / support of a CiviCRM component or related module. e.g. CiviCase, CiviCampaign, Views integration, CiviEvent Discount module, etc.
- Your employees / consultants have attended CiviCRM training programs, or have demonstrated significant expertise on IRC/forums.
- Contributing code patches along with unit tests which fix bugs, improve performance, add generally useful features, etc.
- Publishing, distributing and maintaining code you've written for your client to the larger CiviCRM community. Getting that code back into the core code base is an added bonus. e.g. CiviMail multithreading job, template restructuring, etc.
- Coordinate and manage a significant sub-task. e.g. maintain and update the FLOSS manuals book and / or the documentation wiki, Case Study Page redesign, API Team, etc.
- Have some of your employees involved with our recent week long code/book sprint(s).
Some organizations on the current active list excel at one or two of the items on the above list while other organizations make strong contributions across multiple items on this list. We do realize that the above is not comprehensive, and we'd be happy to edit it and add some more items and/or more specifics to each item. Do let us know your thoughts as a comment to this blog post. We would love to see more and more "active" organizations. We plan on reviewing and adjusting the list twice a year.
We are also planning to use the "case studies" part of the listing as an equivalent exchange for being on the services listing. We do think its important that organizations give back something to the community in exchange for the listing. We're also planning on requiring organizations to periodically (yearly?) update and create new case studies.
Comments
I always give a portion of the revenue that come from CiviCRM installs - could that be a criteria?
Perhaps a "sponsor" listing page but it doesn't seem fair to include paid placement in a list of organizations and individuals that have more involvement in the CiviCRM community.
hey there,
thanks for this post - always good to be transparent about these kind of things. i quite enjoy looking at these listings.
just to be clear - is there are criteria for being on the additional organisations list apart from asking to be on it?
and also, call me vain, but i am wondering if there is any black magic behind the ordering of the list? my hunch is that it is done on the opinions of the core team (which seems quite reasonable). a while ago I think that Third Sector Design was up at the giddy heights of number 3 - that was maybe around last October when we were doing lots of UK stuff. Now we are at number 6, which is still pretty alright ... just wondering :)
There are likely several orgs that are equal in terms of their overall contribution, but a top to bottom listing implies a higher one is "better".
I can see that the page is a drupal view. Maybe some element of (possibly weighted) randomness could be coded into the listing.
Or any ideas for a different visual representation?
Or what's most important to people who use this list? Geographic location? Votes? Price range?
Adding taxonomy terms to each entry (something like Drupal, Joomla, Hosting, Support, Training, Developer) and exposing those terms as search options would make the page more functional for potential clients. Removing the right sidebar should allow the table to fill the entire page and make the company overview column easier to read.