Members Page

[matteom]

One first and easy issue to address is the one of officially and publicly recognizing the effort of the members of Appsterdam, as some of us believe this is not properly done at the moment.

Plase don't misunderstand this, as I'm not saying that anybody is ungrateful for what we do. What I mean is that there is no public record of who does what for Appsterdam. Somebody raised this issue very well in our meeting. Although some people put a lot of effort into the organization, if you Google their name nothing related to Appsterdam comes out, so there is no proof he ever did any of that. Even for me, the only mention is on pages I directly manage, like my website or Linkedin profile.

During the meeting, when we decided to use Github, it was proposed as a system for instant recognition. You do a commit and that immediately is reflected in your profile. Although this is indeed true, I don’t think this is the right way to address this issue. Most of the effort people put in Appsterdam is outside of the scope of Github. When I’m at the WWLL every wednesday, nothing gets committed to the repo. When Eddy schedules a speaker, nothing gets pushed. When Judy spends time in one of the many things she does for Appsterdam, that is not reflected here. Not even these issues get tracked by the system as contributions.

Most of the people outside of the organization don’t know what Github is, how it works and how to browse it. We have to remember that Github is familiar to developers that use it every day, but for others it's completely unknown.

Everybody understands a website though. If you look on Google for Appsterdam, our website is the first to come, while the Github repo is nowhere to be found on the first page.

So, my proposal to solve this is simple: let's replace the Appsterdammers page from our website, which at the moment sports a random list of twitter profiles of people who have nothing to do with Appsterdam and does not provide any value to anybody.

We can replace it with a page containing the real members and what they do. Each entry gets a picture and a short bio of the person, pointing also at what the person does outside of Appsterdam.

This provides a better way to recognize the efforts of the volunteers, providing them the value of credibility and exposure, which might help them getting, for example, more work to sustain themselves. This would be a simple way for the organization to contribute for its members without having to spend money for it.

To make this easy to implement, people can write their own bio and provide their own picture by pushing it to the repo. After that, all that is left is for someone with access to the website to actually create the page, which I think should not take more than one hour.

[tross6]

This is a late reply, but I wanted to note here that this is a good idea, and will be addressed, at least initially by the end of February.