[Marketing] software vs project website discussion of gvsig and qgis

Committees Marketing
1

The choose-a-project wizard is now working, we had to cut down some of the tags last week and change how the pages were done to make it happen.

This touches on a conversation with Steve Feldman from the code sprint. As part of the focus exercise the home page was changed to says “Choose your software” which then links to “choose-a-project”.

It does bring up two interesting cases:

  1. http://osgeo.getinteractive.nl/projects/qgis/

QGIS - has several software projects now under one banner.

  • QGIS Desktop
  • QGIS Server
  • more?

This is kind of messing with the system (and resulting in oddities like QGIS being listed as a cloud processing service, I assume QGIS server could run in the cloud and qgis desktop offers processing).

  1. http://osgeo.getinteractive.nl/projects/gvsig/

Same thing, there are now multiple gvSig software projects:

  • gvSIG Desktop
  • gvNIX
  • gvSIG Mobile
  • i3Geo

Recommendation for the beta website:

  • Making the QGIS Association page under Partners, linking to individual pages for QGIS and QGIS Server project pages.
  • Makin the gvSIG Association link to the individual software project pages for gvSIG Desktop, gvNIX, gvSIG Mobile, i3Geo.
···

–
Jody Garnett

2

My 1st thoughts on ‘projects’ and ‘software’ are to look at definitions:

Project:

"In contemporary business and science, a project is an individual or collaborative enterprise, possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned, usually by a project team, to achieve a particular aim.[1]
A project may also be a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations.[2]
It may be a temporary (rather than permanent) social systems as work systems that is constituted by teams within or across organizations to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints.[3] A project may be a part of a wider programme management” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project

Software:
"Computer software, or simply software, is a part of a computer system that consists of data or computer instructions, in contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data. Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software

My interpretation:
Each different application e.g. QGIS Desktop, QGIS server is ‘software’ (or we could alternatively use ‘application’ or ‘program’)
The QGIS Project is the umbrella organisation/collaboration/social construct/enterprise that encompasses and coordinates the individual software/applications/programs
I think the important thing for us as a marketing group is to consider what these terms mean to potential users rather than how we use them internally (for our community ‘project’ can be interchangeable with ‘software’).

···

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Jody Garnett

3

I am going to have a hard time letting go of project, not sure I have the energy to change this far in.

I do not find the term software used on its own often much recently. I would of expected “technology” but perhaps that is me.

It is tricky as the unit of an open source is a project (not just the software) and I wonder if we should use this as a teaching moment.

If I we to keep “project” we would need a sentence like: Open source projects are a team effort producing geospatial technology.

···

–
Jody Garnett