Create Marketplace guidelines

Did you read http://drupal.org/node/1103306#comment-4377594 ?

I strongly disagree with the idea of post-moderation, which may work fine for spam, but is a lot more of an issue with an issue as complex and thorny as the marketplace. Is there a reason we can't have a separate section for companies not yet approved to still show up? Otherwise I think that the nodes should remain unpublished until they get approved, not get automatically approved and wait for someone to "tattle" on the offending party. Since this is one of the only chances that the Drupal community has to engage companies and developers who are using Drupal but not contributing, I feel we should make this a process that encourages good behaviors, not punishes bad ones (I do realize the current/old system seemed to punish people for a variety of seemingly random reasons).

Also, one thing that I feel that's missing from this conversation is explanation of the intended behaviors we hope to see from the companies whom apply. I personally feel that the biggest item that separates Drupal hackers from pros is the integration of patches and d.o.'s issue queues into their professional workflows. Also, given that there's no endorsement from any party to get listed, having publicly published materials to point to provides potential users of the marketplace with the means to vet developers they are considering hiring.

Overall, I think this is a really great move, and hope that we can finally do away with the old marketplace section soon!

@chx Yes, your comments in both threads were read, listened to, and incorporated into this set of guidelines. We value code and community contributions over financial contributions and although we want everyone to have a DA membership before being listed that membership can be free.

@alex_ua
Regarding post moderation.
Post moderation is done due to the large volume of companies that want to be listed. We currently track over 800 companies that are actively using Drupal and I'm sure there are many more. Those companies can be listed on the "All services" page with post-moderation. However, to be listed on the "Featured providers" page (the front and most visible page) it requires a pre-approval/screening process.

Explanation of the intended behaviors

We attempted to capture the list of intended behaviors in the "Which companies will be promoted to Featured listing?" section. Could we make this section a little more robust?

@jredding, I'm a bit confused. Are you suggesting that there are 800 companies that meet the criteria for the services page? Or, are you suggesting that the criteria listed above are not the actual criteria that will be used? As you know, I spent a good amount of time reviewing requests coming in for listing on the d.o. marketplace, and most would still get rejected (and thus thrown off of the list).

My reading of the proposed changes make it seem like there are 3 levels of companies that will be in the service directory, and 1 that won't be viewable to the outside world:
1- Companies who meet the criteria listed above and are listed but not featured.
2- Companies who do not meet the criteria listed above anad are still listed (obviously, they will not be featured)
3- Companies from 1 who also meet additional criteria for contributions
4- Companies from 2 who get caught and snitched on (which will then be, I presume, a private listing of naughty companies that don't read or care for rules?)

Even if the current marketplace listings were doubled, which is doubtful for the near term using the criteria cited above, we're talking about 220 companies that would fall into criteria 1. I find the differences between that and those listed in 3 to be a bit dubious, but I would guess from our current list that we'd have no more than 100 companies listed there?

Another thing that I find lacking is an explanation of how the/us snitches should snitch, what will be told to the companies that are getting removed after getting ratted out, and what the processes are for getting re-listed once you've addressed. That and I'd also love to know how you plan to deal with the ~600 companies that will get removed from the list before it goes live (i.e. all of those in 2 above). If this sounds like a witch hunt or purge, then you know why I think post-moderation is a really bad idea. Having a "bouncer" at the door to a party in order to keep out the uncool (non-contributors) is a much less problematic problem then letting anyone at the party challenge anyone else's right to be there (and seemingly getting them kicked out with little problem).

I think the big problem here is that there is a real desire is to let all 800 companies get listed, despite ongoing community opposition to such an effort. I can tell you that my company gets a very large % of our incoming sales inquiries from that listing, and I'd assume it's the same with many contributing companies, so there should be an expectation of resistance to a change that lowers the value of the contributions we (our selves, companies, and employees) make.

@alexu_a

This is a path forward for the Drupal.org website and community. We have many more companies getting involved in the project now or using the project for their core services. We want to see as many of them as possible contribute to the project . Your concern about community opposition to listing companies reflects only one side of the community - the other side of the community are those that want to be listed and have no clear path to that listing. They have lingered in the issue queue for years. The plan is to create an "All" and "Featured" part of our marketplace listing to allow new companies to announce their existence to the world while rewarding those that contribute heavily to our project.

The phrase "These following contributions are listed in rough order of priority:" has always annoyed me. I'd prefer something like "The following contributions are taken into account." While working on core is a Good Thing, it's not the Only Thing.

"Shared some Drupal brochures with the community?" - I have no idea what that really means. What brochures? Which community?

@jredding - above it says " If you have a complaint about any company that is listed, we would like you to contact us through the Drupal Association contact form."

If someone does contact the Association, is there someone listening at that end? Are there policies/procedures in place to address the problem?

@jredding

This is a path forward for the Drupal.org website and community.

You don't speak for the community, and neither do I. We both speak for the organizations we run and (to some smaller degree) for the people whom work for us. Anyway, platitudes aside...

We have many more companies getting involved in the project now or using the project for their core services. We want to see as many of them as possible contribute to the project .

Good, we're on the same page. I am arguing that the way being suggested to add companies to the directory will lead to fewer companies transitioning from Drupal users to Drupal contributors. The way that is being suggested will also lead to more conflict between old companies and new, as companies like my own will do the right thing and boot the non-contributors from the list. If you want a free ride, take a Portland tram, but don't try to get on this list without kicking in some contributions.

Your concern about community opposition to listing companies reflects only one side of the community - the other side of the community are those that want to be listed and have no clear path to that listing.

This is such a straw man argument I don't even know how to approach it. You have no way to know if my opinion represents "one side" of the community or not- your binary thinking in this case is simply a way to attempt to shove your opinions down the throats of others, no matter if there are 2 sides to this or 100 (and I'd hazard to guess it was closer to 100). Anyway, you have no authority to claim who is in or not in the community any more than I do, so drop the attempts at winning with rhetoric and political platitudes (it will never, ever happen), and let's stick to substance.

Because this must not have been clear above, let me state this again: I want there to be a path for companies that are contributing to the community to get listed on the marketplace. What I would like to see is pre-listing moderation, as well as a listing of companies that sell drupal but don't give a thing, so that we might lead these companies towards contributing.

The plan is to create an "All" and "Featured" part of our marketplace listing to allow new companies to announce their existence to the world while rewarding those that contribute heavily to our project.

What is listed under "All", in your mind? If you look at the #s above, there is no public space in the proposed solution for companies that haven't contributed yet but "want to". Instead those companies have either been tattled on or not, they have no legitimate space within the proposed rules around listing. If I'm wrong, please tell me which of the rules above actually allows you to get listed without contributing a thing?

Anyway, I didn't see anything in the other threads that indicated a community interest in de-valuing contributions and allowing non-contributors to take advantage of our shared marketing resources. If you have some examples of a clamor for less contributors on the list then by all means share it, otherwise, your "side" of the argument is the vast minority and thus you'll not have your way simply by pretending you represent the community while promoting something that has little-to-no community support outside of the DA (who do not represent the community from where I sit. I didn't vote for any of them, and as we know, some at the DA care more for their own business interests than for the interests of the community, at least from the outside looking in).

@silverwing is right to raise a flag about the DA taking over moderation here- if only because it's confusing who now controls this section. Has the DA usurped the community's say over who should get listed here, bringing the complaints away from prying eyes into the untrustworthy internal communications of a still-secretive org, or are the webmasters still in control? I think this needs its own issue queue, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand by and let the DA take over moderation and bring it out of the open and into their private spaces for a few select insiders to decide. The DA has its own interests, and those have often seemed to mimic the business interests of its board members (who also happen to be my competitors), so @jredding and the DA should expect a fight if they attempt to pull the wool over our eyes as they give away something as valuable to contributing businesses as these listings, especially without much in the way of community support (and with much in the way of community concerns).

@silverwing (#6)
"These following contributions are listed in rough order of priority:" has always annoyed me. I'd prefer something like "The following contributions are taken into account."

How about:
"We value all contributions to our community. The follow should provide a guide to what contributions our community values"

@silverwing (#7)
Yes. The DA has received these requests in the past and we're working on how to best handle them in the future. Due to our connection to most Drupal business we're best aligned to handle at least the initial request or to help broker a committee that will handle these requests. Ideally positive and negative reviews would be handled publicly like they are on angieslist, yelp, amazon, etc. So the good, the bad, and the ugly publicly.

@alexu_a

I feel as those there is a bit of miscommunication here and perhaps you and I should jump on the phone to clear it up, sometimes voice leads to a faster resolution. Fully aware that you want this to all be public, we can record the call and post the .mp3 to the issue queue for transparency (yes, I'm serious).

You stated

What I would like to see is pre-listing moderation, as well as a listing of companies that sell drupal but don't give a thing, so that we might lead these companies towards contributing.

That is *exactly* what we're creating. A dual-listing marketplace with "Featured" and "All". To be listed in the Featured section you must *first* be listed in the "All" section and then go through a *pre-moderation* process done through the webmasters issue queue to verify your contributions. The marketplace will default to featured listings only and all filters will filter on featured listings only. To see "All" listings the user must directly click the "All listings" tab or choose "Show all listings". We've even discussed weighting the featured listings such that they appear at the top of the lists when a user is viewing all listings (ex: Google search pages)

Our goal is to highlight community contributors first, foremost, and always.

Your concerns over moderation are well justified. I'm not sure how it came across that the DA was going to do the moderation, this is not the case. These guidelines outline the system as it currently is, which is:

Step 1) Post your organization node
This automatically posts an issue into the webmaster issue queue (I agree with you that we need a new issue queue for this) for community moderation

Step 2) The organization node is automatically posted under "All" services but subject to review

Step 3) Each company must apply separately to be listed under the "Featured" area, which is a community ran process (same process as today)

Where the DA steps is in a few places

• Build the software to make this happen
• Work with the community to review slow review/logjams
• Make it look pretty by organizing a graphic design process on the page
• Monitor the page for its effectiveness of new people finding companies

So far all changes that have been made to marketplace started in and have been worked through in a public issue queue including these guidelines.

If post-moderation for the "All" listings is still a sticky issue here are two more ideas to move the page forward:

1) Time delayed moderation
--- When a new organization node is created it will be immediately be posted into the respective issue queue (currently webmaster) for pre-moderation. If after two weeks no activity is seen on the node then the node is automatically approved and posted to the "All providers" section of the marketplace listing. Feature listings must be approved through the issue queue

2) Flag unmoderated listings
--- When a new organization node is added to the "All" section of the marketplace listing it will have a graphical indicator showing that the listing has not yet been community reviewed. For example: "Listing not yet community reviewed [link: /node/123456]". The link will go to a page explaining the purpose of community review and how we review all listings to ensure that companies are contributing to our project and community - encouraging people to support those companies that contribute to open source.

Given that the closest thing to a resource of this kind for our community is https://www.acquia.com/partners/finder, which is both a) from a commercial company (and one of your competitors), and b) AFAIK a "pay to play" system, I'm utterly mystified why there is so much community resistance towards creating an equivalent resource here in "neutral" territory on Drupal.org, as long as the "Featured" listings that promote contributing companies are always first and foremost, which absolutely no one will ever disagree with.

Jacob, I'm happy to jump on the phone, but I highly suggest you re-read the above, because the "All companies" listings still require you to be a contributing company, so I'm completely dumfounded how you continue to claim that this means everyone can get listed so long as the've heard of Drupal and are smart enough to realize they can get a free listing:

All providers
To get your company listed in the “All providers” section:
1. Contribute: You must have a proven record of community contributions (Examples include: patches, modules, themes, documentation, support in IRC, marketing support, and event organization)

Again, under the rules outlined above there is no place on this list for non-contributing companies, there's only room for non-contributing companies that have not been tattled on yet. So, can you please just tell me where you get this idea from that anyone will be able to get listed here? Is there some hidden text that I don't have access to? One last time: if we are going to follow these rules it will not a space for any companies who do not contribute, it will leave only a group of people listed that shouldn't be (i.e. those who have not contributed and have not been told on), and a private list of companies that have been caught posting without following the rules (I'm assuming it will only be visible to the webmasters after it's been unpublished).

While we're on the subject of smart PR moves, shall I go through and start the list of 600+ companies that will need to be removed under the proposed workflow? It will be very interesting to see how the DA handles its new role as arbiter of business listings here after those companies are delisted within a very short period of time. Oh, and with regards to:

. I'm not sure how it came across that the DA was going to do the moderation, this is not the case. These guidelines outline the system as it currently is, which is:

That's easy, because it says so:

How should I report problems with a listed company?
We understand that while a listing does not mean an endorsement, there is the potential for poor companies to be listed. It's very important to research these companies yourself before committing to any services. If you have a complaint about any company that is listed, we would like you to contact us through the Drupal Association contact form.

I have complaints about ~600 of the companies, in that they've contributed little-to-nothing, so just let me know what format to send the docs and you can review in privacy with the DA. Again, the DA lacks any credibility to deal with business conflicts, or procedures for dealing with conflicts-of-interest. The DA is the wrong group for this task and should keep out of these sort of contentious business policy debates until it has completely removed any doubts about who the DA board represents (i.e. some obviously have represented themselves and their business interests and not the interests of the broader community of individuals and organizations).

I disagree with both of your suggested changes, for the same reason as the first. We should not be adding people, just because they can't get attention to get listed. Instead, we should have a separate queue, run by those who have been through the process before, and flagging is exactly the "tattling" I find disturbing.

Give me a call if you want to talk- I'm around, available, and you have my #.

@jredding "We value all contributions to our community. The follow should provide a guide to what contributions our community values" sounds great!

And I just wanted to confirm that the DA would be doing something if a complaint came in. Thanks for verifying.

@silverwing Wonderful! Thanks for the feedback and being a part of the process

@alexu_a
The reason that the "All" listing states "contribute" is because contributions are what make our project and our community great. Everyone should be encouraged and told up front to contribute. We value the heavy contributors and will promote them to Featured but everyone should contribute in some fashion.

We are opting to open the gates and allow anyone to post and do post-moderation to ease the burden on the webmasters. If someone goes through and finds a company that is not contributing and is not an active member of our community we'll have the grounds necessary to remove them. If we don't communicate to them what we value those companies will not know what they should be doing.

Regarding the DA interjecting to review business complaints our process will be the same as before. This process happens now, we are just writing it down. People call the DA to complain about a listing or someone online. In the past year I've handled probably 20-30 such complaints. Our response is nearly always the same. Please post in the webmasters queue and publicly state your complaint. If you would rather not complain publicly we will make a private note and follow-up with the company directly, which we do. In reality these have not been a problem. In fact we've had more of a problem with dead-links to now defunct companies that we do about bad companies and I handle many more calls about online flamewars than I do about bad businesses.

@webchick is absolutely correct. We want to make drupal.org a better place for everyone using the site and this discussion is not moving us towards that goal. By not moving forward we're simply allowing a commercial company to direct business to its partners instead of using this immense community asset to better our project by encouraging more companies to contribute.

@alexu_a Much of the work on this final set of guidelines comes from your own suggestions, perhaps we understood them incorrectly and if so please clarify. We specifically read, listened to, and incorporated your feedback from these comments:
http://drupal.org/node/1103306#comment-5649838
http://drupal.org/node/1103306#comment-5650712
http://drupal.org/node/1103306#comment-5652154

As I understand it we are all in agreement on "Featured" listings so that's a pass

The question is what does "All" mean. I see three options here:
1) All = non-contributing and contributing companies
2) All = contributing companies that are vetted through POST-moderation
3) All = contributing companies that are vetted through PRE-moderation

If #1 gets us through this process then I will acquiesce and move forward with it. I personally think all of our requirements should always include the wording "contribute" so that we instill that throughout our community. However, that wording seems to negate "All" in the eyes of @alexu_a so let's remove it and move forward.

The change would be the following
All providers
To get your company listed in the “All providers” section:
1. Contributions encouraged: We strongly encourage you to contribute to the project and the community (Examples include: patches, modules, themes, documentation, support in IRC, marketing support, and event organization)

@webchick- the closest thing to a resource of this kind for our community is http://drupal.org/marketplace (which redirects to http://drupal.org/drupal-services ). It is a) from a non-commercial entity (the Drupal community) and b) does not require anyone to pay a thing (other than via their contributions). I am utterly confused as to how you could really advocate a change that severely lowers the value of being a contributing company, and turns the marketplace into a jumbled mess of contributing companies and those that haven't done anything except notice Drupal's popularity and figured out a cheap way to use that fact to their advantage.

Also, we are Acquia partners (and listed on there), so I'm not sure how we're competitors, or really what your main point is. Drupal.org is not owned by a private company, so it should not follow the same rules. Is this really contentious?

-1000 to the change suggested in #13- I think it's a horrendous idea, and will only serve to lower the value placed upon contributions within our community. Let's put it to a vote, shall we? Those in favor of reducing the contribution requirements (to nothing) for inclusion on the d.o. marketplace raise their hands!

@jredding, none of this comes from my suggestions, since I never advocated lowering the bar for contributing companies to get listed. The first item says I'd like to value patches more (relatively to other contributions), the second isn't actually from me (though it's important to note the entire thread is NOT about lowering the bar to nothing, as you're currently suggesting), the third I say that the effort should be aimed at breaking the logjam of "contributing companies" getting listed as such.

So, where exactly are these words you used to lower the bar to entry to the d.o. marketplace to nothing? I'll save you the time: it's not there, and if you go back to the threads you'll see a steady barrage of resistance to even your more moderate changes. What makes you think that things will be different this time?

Oh, well I guess I assumed you meant Acquia as part of your point about your competitors having board members on the DA, else I don't really know what that's referring to. But I agree that Acquia is not in competition with any of the partners listed on its partners page, and rather funnels professional service business to those people. My point is that we should not entrust a for-profit company to play that role. Drupal.org should be doing that.

http://drupal.org/drupal-services is a wonderful resource, if your needs represent a > $50K job and you can pay top dollar for top talent, and you are able to wait weeks or months until the top tier Drupal companies/individuals have availability. The vast majority of people who use Drupal are not in that boat, at all. They are small businesses, churches, non-profits, whatever, and their proposals generally go to /dev/null at a busy top-tier shop like the ones listed on the services page. And so their only recourse is acquia.com, or else choosing another technology that they can actually find some help with.

I hear you loud and clear on your defense of the current services page. You are saying, "I am a business which makes a tremendous amount of huge contributions to Drupal, monetarily, resource-wise, and in terms of time. In return, I get tremendous business value out of being one of a very elite subset of companies that are featured on Drupal.org." I don't think Jacob is suggesting anything differently. We want to prominently feature companies that give a tremendous amount to the Drupal project, and in fact the more prominently we feature them, the more we'll attract more companies to do the same. We just also want to give those folks whose needs are not met by the companies on the current services page some alternatives, as well as provide a way for the smaller, lesser-known shops to get on the first rung of the contributing ladder.

Oh, well I guess I assumed you meant Acquia as part of your point about your competitors having board members on the DA, else I don't really know what that's referring to.

Jeez, do we really need to rehash this here? Acquia is not the only business who is or has been well represented on the DA Board. A certain Board Chair Treasurer & another former board member's company was awarded a $45k no-bid contract to pay them to host a conference they forced to come to their city. That taint will stain the DA for as long as that money remains unreturned and the board member remains seated (corruption has lingering side effects).

I'll just reiterate what I said before: the bar can be lowered to allow for companies that have given less, but it should not be lowered to accept those that have given nothing. There's no possible justification for why this should happen that I can see, other than to stop complaints from reaching the DA. There are plenty of additional places to look for Drupal help, but the help listed on the d.o. site should be limited to those that help with Drupal.

Yes, this is a valuable resource, it is one of the only tangible benefits of actually contributing, and to debase it means lowering the implied and actual value of contributing to the project.

@alexu_a

OK. #13 was a misunderstanding of how I read your comment. I read your comment to mean that you wanted a space for non-contributing companies to list their service availability. Now I understand that you don't want non-contributors to be listed. This means that the guidelines as written are correct, which state "To be listed #1) Contribute"

I feel as though the real issue is that of Pre or Post moderation. Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be in favor of Pre-moderation, which means that everyone must go through a moderation process to be listed in the Featured listings or the All listings section of the marketplace. Is this correct?

I'd like to note that a pre-moderation system would be in line with how we run Planet. There's something to be said for consistency across systems - less confusing that way.

I'd like to note that a pre-moderation system would be in line with how we run Planet. There's something to be said for consistency across systems - less confusing that way.

I'd like to counter-note that in the places we incorporate a pre-moderation system, we generally fail at doing so in a consistent, reliable, and fair way, and it causes all kinds of terrible problems.

Planet Drupal: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/webmasters?status%5B%5D=Open&com... has requests that have been sitting around for 1 year, 49 weeks.

Drupal.org front page promotion: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/webmasters?order=created&sort=as... 1 year, 22 weeks.

Project applications: http://drupal.org/project/issues/projectapplications?order=created&sort=... 1 year, 17 weeks.

Services listing: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/webmasters?status%5B%5D=Open&com... 2 years, 17 weeks

What tends to happen is the people already in the "in" crowd who "know someone" on one of these teams get their requests processed lightning-fast. There's nothing particularly nefarious about this; generally, people on the webmasters team know these people because they're already great contributors—particularly code contributors—and since part of the purpose of pre-moderation is to weed out spammers and other crumby people it's only natural that if you already know someone is not like that, you'll fast-track them.

But the problem is, everyone else (which is the vast majority of requests) gets to sit and wait until a random volunteer stumbles across their post, and that can literally be weeks, months, or years. And worse, we have no meaningful way of tracking most non-code contributions, such as event sponsorship, marketing/outreach, sprint organization, etc. so it's really hard for those volunteers to pick out and verify that a company actually is contributing to Drupal, unless said company is in a financial position to set aside engineering time for public issue queue work, which most are not.

The upshot is It creates an extremely bad "insider's club" image of Drupal.org governance, and drives out would-be contributors in droves. It's also doubly harmful because the DA is generally on the receiving end of this rage, despite these not being the DA's processes, and the DA is the primary (and apart from "+1 subscribe" and the new distro tools rolled out earlier this year, only) funder of major development initiatives on Drupal.org. So when a dysfunctional community process that the DA has no say in pisses off members of our business ecosystem, we end up being hamstrung in our ability to roll out improvements to Drupal.org without asking even more from the companies already giving all they can give. It's a really vicious cycle, and one we desperately need to break.

Launching the marketplace is step 0.

As an active site maintainer, I'm 100% for POST moderation.

As site maintainers, we have this undocumented Status called "Silence." Silence can mean a couple different things. First is "No." We don't want to say "Sorry, you can't have your pony" so just just ignore it. Second, it can mean "I don't care enough/I don't know enough about 'it.'" I believe that the users requesting business listings (service-list and training) often get ignored for the second reason.

Then we have the people power part of the system. It seems that over the last year that many of the site maintainers haven't been active. So take fewer maintainers, factor in the human nature condition that they'll usually only respond to something they're interested in, and you have more silence.

Is post moderation the ideal way to do this? Probably not. But having requests sitting around for days/weeks isn't great either. So I'd rather have some Organizations that shouldn't be there be published for a while rather than having Organizations that should be there linger in Issue Queue limbo.

@jredding in #18: this is not just about pre- or post- moderation, though that's a big component of it. The Marketplace is one of the most important resources for contributing businesses--obviously the code and the issue queues are far more so--and that's why I have already been investing so much of my own and my employees time to both the marketplace redesign and issues in the site maintainer queue. As the owner of a company that contributes about as much as any bootstrapped company of our size, I fear the changes as they are currently being discussed will have a large adverse effect on our business, and thus on the contributions that we are able to make.

I really don't know if this is the best place to post this, but in my opinion this issue is putting the cart before the horse to a degree, because we lack many of the basic principles that should be guiding us. So... I'd like to propose the following as a set of principles that I hope can guide us as we think about what the new marketplace should really look like, and I'll follow those with some specific steps that I believe could lead to a launch of an awesome new marketplace before the end of summer.

Proposed Drupal.org Marketplace Principles

Be Open

We are an Open Source Software community, and our strength comes largely from our openness. Official communications should remain in official channels (drupal.org issue queues and groups.drupal.org).

Be Fair

The rules for admittance to the Marketplace need to be clearly stated and and the processes adhered to. In the US we have the concept that it is only fair to be judged by ones peers, and I believe that it must be the case here as well. Contributing businesses should be judged, by and large, by contributing business owners, though any community member should be able to be a part of the process.
There are many reasons to move the marketplace issues out of the site maintainers issue queue (the lack of time of the maintainers is another), but the moral one that I feel strongly about is that site maintainers are not, by and large, the peers of those who are applying, and thus their interests can be different or directly conflict. I also feel that the ad-hoc rule making that I've seen in judging companies is unfair to those seeking listings.

Be flexible

If an applicant is contributing in ways not yet listed in the contributions, consider whether the contributions need to be updated.

Should encourage participation, contribution, and adherence to standards

Open Source Software & Communities gain strength as they gain size, so the marketplace should do everything it can to encourage more companies to participate, contribute, and adhere to the community's standards.
This is an opportunity to engage in a dialog with ~600 companies who are using, but not contributing to, Drupal, or joining us in this amazing community. That's potentially an army of new contributors, so let's please try to not f*ck it up..

Should have a low barrier of entry, but not too low to be meaningless

In order to keep new companies engaged we should ensure that we admit new companies to the list quickly, but only promote them gradually.
This is really an extension of the last principle, and I believe is important in order to avoid the very real feelings of being shut out that @webchick and others are expressing. I believe that we should adopt an open badge model, and we should allow for filtering of the marketplace based upon those "badges". So, training becomes a badge, pro dev shop becomes a badge (and you have to have a lot of patches and show integration with d.o.'s issue queues to attain it!), Pro Theming becomes a badge, etc.

If these seem like a good starting point, then I'd like to propose the following steps to move this forward and get the marketplace launched:

• Create a new issue queue for the marketplace and move all of the current marketplace issues into it
• Create a role for and put the workflows in place to deal with moderation of the marketplace
• Do outreach to the "peers" of the companies that will be getting judged (for now that should be limited to those companies listed in the current services directory, so long as they are not there in err). I plan to start on this by posting to the planet and reaching to a bunch of the owners of the companies listed there and at least trying to get them to chime in here (I doubt many know this thread exists)
• Finalize the initial guidelines, with an explicit understanding that they will change. This likely means agreeing on at least a couple of the "badges" (for contributing pro dev shops, trainers, etc)
• Review ALL marketplace items (should take no longer than 2-4 weeks) and revise the guidelines as edge cases start to appear

I know that's a lot, and this may not be the right place for it, but I figured I'd post here first...

Also, unless someone objects I am going to put (DRAFT) in the title of @tvn's post here: http://drupal.org/node/1635092 . Many of the items listed there are not yet agreed upon, and hopefully will never be reality.

I am not applying to the DA to get listed. I contribute a lot (and my company even more), and I should not be forced to give to any support--implied or explicit-- to a "non profit org" that has unrepentantly violated one the most basic tenets of non-profit governance (the board should be donors, not clients or customers). Take that part out, please- it was opposed vigorously in the other threads and the DA cannot have its way simply by posting pages on d.o. And yes, I did support it, but I now see the follies of my ways. I give therefore I am... a "contributing company".

I agree with @webchick in #21. This is a problem, and comes with the territory of having a growing community that's been around for years. My concern is that the more that Drupal.org is perceived as an insiders' club, the more harm is done to the long-term interests of the community. People are busy, including those working the Webmasters queue. Already the Webmasters are overburdened, given how long issues can languish without attention. I agree with Jacob's point that we do want a system that encourages contribution by more consultants and companies. The more objective the system, the better. I don't feel that using the subjective and overburdened Webmaster queue as the gating mechanism is the best approach.

But there's a broader question here: Does Drupal.org or the Marketplace exist to serve the businesses? Is the appropriate measure really by how businesses benefit from it? Obviously businesses want to benefit by it, but is that how we should measure the success of the Marketplace?

I submit that the more important question is: What kind of Marketplace is going to best serve people looking for services? If it's a short list of those of us who do big projects and presumably can afford to contribute more, are the majority of service-shoppers (who have smaller budgets) well served? If it's a big long undifferentiated laundry list of companies and consultants, well, it's likely not going to be all that helpful, either. And yet, in the end, I'd rather see a more open-door policy than a system with moderation issues languishing for months and years. We can add differentiation through taxonomy, metrics, etc. iteratively over time.

Re DA membership, I think the very modest org membership fee is a reasonable requirement to be listed.

No offense meant, but it would be great to hear support from those who are not, or have not, been members of the DA's board (and I'd say GA). This obviously will have positive financial effects for the DA...

And yes, when @webchick asks what we can do to encourage more businesses to contribute (something she has asked in person and online many times) I think it is eminently fair to ask what means exist to accomplish that. In this case (in most cases?) that means examining what business interests are derived from contributing, and this is one of the biggest explicit gains I have seen from all of the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars of work we have contributed over the past 4+ years.

Contribution is gold, so let's treat it as such. The DA is not the only form of contribution and should not get a special placement at the front of the contribution line without the non-DA members of the community's consent.

No offense meant, but it would be great to hear support from those who are not, or have not, been members of the DA's board (and I'd say GA). This obviously will have positive financial effects for the DA...

While I disagree with the notion that anyone who has held an unpaid volunteer position with the DA has a conflict of interest – the DA's financial success means nothing for me beyond what it would mean for you – I agree that it would be great to get input from more community members on this.

I also feel that if a DA program or initiative can help reduce the fiscal burden borne by DrupalCons, which currently account for the vast majority of DA revenues, that's a good thing.

@laura, fair enough, but go back and look through the old issues and you'll see a couple of patterns. First, there's a general agreement that we do not want to remove moderation (post-moderation is another way of saying no moderation, at least at first). Second, the only people I really have seen advocate for this horrendous idea are the people who are proposing it, who happen to all have official affiliations with the DA. And really, out of a community of many thousands how many people fall into that category? 20? 50?

Again: there is no general support for the DA, or a DA membership, to take over the initial moderation. Drop that idea, remove the DA from the equation completely (membership should not be an initial requirement and the DA cannot serve as shadow moderators outside of the confines of public d.o. issue queues and g.d.o) and I believe we can figure out a solution to get all contributed companies listed in 2-4 weeks. In fact, I'll give you my word that there won't be an issue without two reviews by 2 weeks (my word is my bond), and that there won't be an issue without some clear instructions .

Also, why should I care about the DA's revenue? They don't represent my interests, my business interests, or as far as I'm concerned the interests of the Drupal Community at-large. I give in many different ways, and will continue to do so, but will not support an organization that does not mesh with my values.

@alexu_a

The write-up you did in #23 is quite awesome, I think the wording really helps people to understand our values and how they can contribute to making this project better. This wording would really help those looking to be listed and also those that are assessing and judging who gets to be featured. Unfortunately I don't agree with your assessment of my interactions in regards to the marketplace. We've been listening to, making changes, and incorporating feedback from you, @silverwing, @chx, and many others since the beginning, which is now well over a year old and nearing two years. A DA membership can be had for free based on @chx's feedback and post moderation was a suggestion from the infrastructure team/webmasters (including @silverwing). In fact we're planning on rolling out a sliding membership fee this Fall that will allow anyone to support the DA at an amount they deem fit.

I suggest that our next step is to put this to a vote with the members of the webmasters team that have actively stated they want to help moderate this area on drupal.org. A vote will allow others that do not want to weight in on this thread to have their voice heard

Specifically we should vote on moving forward with:

• The guidelines as stated above (which include the suggestions from @silverwing)
• A dual listing: "Featured" and "All"
• POST-moderation for "All" listings
• PRE-moderation for "Featured" listings
• Beginning with POST and PRE moderation happening in the webmasters queue

@jredding- I've sent you an e-mail, but in case you are still filtering for my e-mails, I consider the following to be a bald faced lie, and ask that you remove it from your comment:

You've been contacted by the conflict of interest committee and you flat out refuse to work with them.

I'll wait for you to respond to my e-mail to respond to the rest of your post, but I won't/can't stand for character attacks based on complete falsehoods.

There are a number of misconceptions (to put it lightly) that need to get cleared up here. I suggest that everyone involved here takes a breather for now.

To help us stay on topic and find resolution for the marketplace I've edited my comment to remove the pieces unrelated to the topic at hand.

It's definitely hard to stay away from the DA issue when the DA insists on injecting itself into this project, but ignoring my specific problems with the DA, I'll post why I think this is a horrible idea. Also, to be clear, I don't want a DA membership at this moment, so its value is actually negative for me (meaning that free is still too expensive).

Anyway, if the values that I expressed above really do express the values that we (as a community) want to adopt and use to guide us, then I feel like it's very easy to see why this is a truly horrendous idea. Let's look at each in turn:
Be Open
By advocating that people contact the DA when they have issues in the marketplace, which is not open to all and not publicly reviewable. There's also an implicit assumption that the DA will be the final arbiter in these decisions, which means that the final decision making will be happening away from prying eyes.

Be Fair
The webmasters and the DA are not the peers of the contributing businesses, though they may own/work at one (sole proprietorships being the exception), and thus it is unfair to have the webmasters and/or the DA have complete control of the process. We have an amazing business community of contributing companies that work together to throw events, contribute to and write modules, etc., and they should get a say in how this happens.

I'd also like to note that such a fundamental change to the operations of a shared resource that holds great benefit for the companies that (I'm guessing) are responsible for the majority of contributions over the past 4-6 years without alerting those businesses to the change is also unfair. I can help change that and will write a post to point to this issue, and will personally contact all of the owners listed on the current marketplace to see if I can get their support for my suggested changes.

Be flexible
By making the baseline a DA membership, we are left

Should encourage participation, contribution, and adherence to standards
This is where the policy fails the hardest. By allowing companies to get listed by simply buying a DA membership, we are clearly sending the message that the most important first step in becoming a contributing company is to give money to the DA (which is a pretty insulting thought from where I sit). Of course we could still engage companies after they are listed, but it is that first step that will set the stage for all subsequent steps, and this is not an acceptable attempt to encourage any of these items.

Also, with hunts and purges are usually not great for community morale, and yet, with post-moderation I will be forced to fight to get several hundred companies

Should have a low barrier of entry, but not too low to be meaningless
Regardless of whether you support or vehemently oppose the DA, contributing a couple of dollars is an almost completely meaningless contribution, if you consider what other contributing companies had to do in order to get listed. I'm all for lowering the barrier for entry, but I believe lowering it to a DA donation is orders of magnitude too low.

So, to answer @jredding's proposed vote, I would counter that we should start with the following simple vote:

Is the Drupal.org Marketplace important and/or busy enough to warrant it's own issue queue?

IMO moving this to its own issue queues and giving the powers of "yes/no/maybeso" to a broader group of people is step 0 here, while the steps @jredding proposed are step 0 for a much more aggressive push to organize businesses to create a counter weight to the DA and web masters, both of whom have (IMO) way too much influence over these hugely important shared business resources.

Is the Drupal.org Marketplace important and/or busy enough to warrant it's own issue queue?

No. And on top of that, -1 to creating /yet another/ silo for issues to pile up. webmasters moderate content and users on Drupal.org. Marketplace listings are content. There's no reason to split it off. Anybody is free to go into the webmaster queue and review planet submissions, marketplace listings, etc. If there are RTBC issues, it's quite easy for a webmaster to go flip the necessary switches.

I would also like to see marketplace disputes handled in the issue queue, just like everything else on Drupal.org.

with hunts and purges are usually not great for community morale

I assume you meant witch hunts. Look, if somebody is on the list and doesn't meet the requirements for the list, it's their own fault. They have nobody to blame but themselves, and if they want to complain about not qualifying for free advertising on Drupal.org, then I'm sure somebody would be more than happy to address that issue by showing them how to get started with contributing.

I would like to see the marketplace listing be a comprehensive list of every Drupal service provider. Featured companies who make lots of contributions to Drupal (whether that's donations to the DA, code contributions, conference organizing, etc) get a special listing that highlights them a bit more than the rest.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the DA membership requirement is kind of pointless for this listing. While I don't think it's too much to ask to buy a membership, I don't think it's actually going to gain us anything. It's not going to filter out the crappy development shops (as the DA membership fee is low enough that it can be purchased on a whim, especially if it means free advertising).

Here's how I'd like to see it run:

- Anybody can create a marketplace listing page (and this shouldn't just be limited to companies - IMO, freelancers should be eligible for inclusion in this list as well: they serve an important market segment)
- If a page is inappropriate and it's flagged enough times, an issue will be automatically created in the webmaster queue to have somebody go review the listing (with the owner of the listing automatically subscribed to that issue).
- If a user wants to get their page into the featured listings, he or she should create an issue in the webmaster queue (similar to how Planet issues work) and make a case for inclusion in the featured listings. A webmaster will review it and promote it if necessary.

On a provider's listing page, I don't think it's unreasonable to promote the fact that they have a DA membership (similar to how it works on user profiles). I also don't think it's unreasonable to add a filter to the marketplace listing view to only display DA members. That is, let's promote DA membership, but not require it.

Sound like a reasonable compromise?

And on top of that, -1 to creating /yet another/ silo for issues to pile up. webmasters moderate content and users on Drupal.org. Marketplace listings are content. There's no reason to split it off. Anybody is free to go into the webmaster queue and review planet submissions, marketplace listings, etc.

Are you a maintainer? I am not, I tried to help in that queue, and was told only site maintainers could move issues along (I can/could comment, but my vote didn't/doesn't count). Either way, my main points with a separate queue is that we could attract a wider group of people to moderate this section if a requirement to moderate wasn't that you had to be a site admin (and you disagree, but I'm not sure why exactly).

Also, these companies are surely posting content, but it is the companies that are getting vetted, so I'm not sure what the site admins have to do with that process.

I assume you meant witch hunts. Look, if somebody is on the list and doesn't meet the requirements for the list, it's their own fault.

I did mean witch hunts, and your comment would be fine if the DA hadn't already sent out an e-mail telling companies they could get listed if they bought a DA membership. Those companies are currently listed in the preview, but had no idea that they shouldn't list themselves. See http://drupal.org/node/911178#comment-4382356 for one example of the confusion.

I would like to see the marketplace listing be a comprehensive list of every Drupal service provider. Featured companies who make lots of contributions to Drupal (whether that's donations to the DA, code contributions, conference organizing, etc) get a special listing that highlights them a bit more than the rest

So there should be no barrier at all to entrance to the listing? This would have the effect of making the marketplace something closer to Craigslist, no? In your opinion, what is the value of having a huge marketplace with non-vetted, non-contributing, companies? It seems to me that it would have very little value at all.

Anybody can create a marketplace listing page (and this shouldn't just be limited to companies - IMO, freelancers should be eligible for inclusion in this list as well: they serve an important market segment)

Freelancers can already get listed in the marketplace, please take a look at the current list, which has a number of freelancers. With that said, I absolutely agree that we should be doing more to promote the sole proprietors and small shops.

Are you a maintainer?

Yes.

Either way, my main points with a separate queue is that we could attract a wider group of people to moderate this section if a requirement to moderate wasn't that you had to be a site admin (and you disagree, but I'm not sure why exactly).

I'm not so sure that's the case. I will happily accept a review of, for instance, a Drupal planet listing from people that I trust, just the same as would happen with a core patch. If some random joe reviews something, then I might give it a little more scrutiny, but after they've reviewed a few things and I know that they're looking carefully, I'll usually trust their judgement. I try to keep an eye on the RTBC queue for webmaster components that I care about (planet, project apps, marketplace) and get them moving when I can. If you RTBC a marketplace issue and I have some way of dealing with it, then I will do so regularly.

As I said, site maintainers maintain content and users on Drupal.org. Marketplace listings are content, so why should the site maintainers not be responsible for the content? If you want to be a site maintainer, follow the instructions on http://drupal.org/project/webmasters. This is not difficult.

what is the value of having a huge marketplace with non-vetted, non-contributing, companies?

Well, in any case, they aren't going to be "vetted" (other than the featured listings). If you want to limit it to only companies that contribute, that's fine: just make it clear what constitutes a contribution.

At this point, I don't really care what contingencies we put on it: I just want to get it out the door so that people can start using it. I'm am absolutely certain that people will tell us what works and what doesn't after it's launched and we can tweak it from there. If we launch it with no barriers to inclusion, and there's a huge influx of companies/freelancers that don't know what they're doing, users of the marketplace will let us know and we can remedy that in a way that's appropriate to the complaint.

I did mean witch hunts, and your comment would be fine if the DA hadn't already sent out an e-mail telling companies they could get listed if they bought a DA membership.

Not my concern. Plus, that verbiage isn't technically inaccurate: you can still get a listing if you buy a DA membership.

@cweagans, this is simply not true:

As I said, site maintainers maintain content and users on Drupal.org.

As you can see in the tabs above there are two additional queues maintaining other sorts of content and users on Drupal.org, one for Documentation and one for Project Applications. There are also queues like http://drupal.org/project/drupalorg, which deals with content on custom pages, and then there are g.d.o. groups that deal with other issues related to people and content on drupal.org, for example the prairie initiative.

I'd also like to point out that there are over 1,000 open issues in the maintainers issue queue (which would make it fifth in # of issues in it's queue if it were listed alongside other projects), which I believe indicates that this queue has taken on too much to manage effectively (it also indicates that there's not enough effort being done to attract maintainers, which is really putting it mildly). The current average age for support requests in almost 3 months,

Well, in any case, they aren't going to be "vetted" (other than the featured listings). If you want to limit it to only companies that contribute, that's fine: just make it clear what constitutes a contribution.

Again, this is not correct. Please see item #1 in the proposed guidelines above, which give the following requirement:

All providers
To get your company listed in the “All providers” section:
1. Contribute: You must have a proven record of community contributions (Examples include: patches, modules, themes, documentation, support in IRC, marketing support, and event organization)

What I am describing is vetting that (1) is true. It's something that has been occurring for years regarding the current service listings, and unless there's a change to the rules that isn't listed, it will be happening well into the future.

As you can see in the tabs above there are two additional queues maintaining other sorts of content and users on Drupal.org, one for Documentation and one for Project Applications. There are also queues like http://drupal.org/project/drupalorg, which deals with content on custom pages, and then there are g.d.o. groups that deal with other issues related to people and content on drupal.org, for example the prairie initiative.

project/drupalorg is a module that's maintained for Drupal.org. The content changes that go in there usually start in the webmaster queue. The gdo groups are no different than the gdo groups for core initiative teams: they hold peripheral discussions, but the actual work happens in an issue queue somewhere.

There is also a project applications component in the webmaster queue. Not sure what the distinction is there, but I'm thinking that there should be an issue opened to address that.

I believe indicates that this queue has taken on too much to manage effectively (it also indicates that there's not enough effort being done to attract maintainers, which is really putting it mildly).

You may have a point here: it is hard to attract maintainers. Maybe that's the problem that we really need to solve. In any case, moving this to a separate queue is doing two things: 1) making the marketplace listing issues harder to find (because they are in yet-another-admin-queue), and 2) only moving the work around.

Look, if we don't have enough people to moderate the issues in the webmaster queue, moving the issues to a different queue is not going to change that. You think that people will magically appear and start working on it? I say again: it is not difficult to become a site maintainer. The only requirements are that you're competent and care about Drupal.org. We certainly would not turn away anybody looking to help with marketplace moderation, and we'd be very likely to give out admin powers to those who request it so that they can help.

We'd have to give out those same admin powers whether or not they are in the webmaster queue or somewhere else. Keeping it in the webmaster queue allows the site maintainers to keep an eye on it and make sure crazy thing aren't happening.

What I am describing is vetting that (1) is true. It's something that has been occurring for years regarding the current service listings, and unless there's a change to the rules that isn't listed, it will be happening well into the future.

I see. I took that to mean that vetted = quality provider.

Let's approach it a different way: Alex, can you give us a succinct list of changes that you think need to be made before the marketplace goes live?

Concerning Dries' Drupal copyright - if a company's name is potentially in violation of the copyright, do the Webmasters work with the user to make sure they receive permission to use the name (until they 'prove' they have the rights) or do we just say "make sure you get permission" and ignore the potential copyright violation?

See #1667958: Promote DrupalJedi to featured

I think just ask. Lawyers can concern themselves with tracking violators down IMO.

@cweagans:

You may have a point here: it is hard to attract maintainers. Maybe that's the problem that we really need to solve. In any case, moving this to a separate queue is doing two things: 1) making the marketplace listing issues harder to find (because they are in yet-another-admin-queue), and 2) only moving the work around.

1) I think that can easily be solved by placing prominent links on the marketplace as well as within the instructions.
2) I disagree here- it would be opening up the work to a new group of people who are not currently involved, for one reason or another.

Look, if we don't have enough people to moderate the issues in the webmaster queue, moving the issues to a different queue is not going to change that. You think that people will magically appear and start working on it? I say again: it is not difficult to become a site maintainer. We certainly would not turn away anybody looking to help with marketplace moderation, and we'd be very likely to give out admin powers to those who request it so that they can help.

That's a defeatist mindset that I don't share. Organizing/people skills are not magic, and I will bet you $1000 that I can gather up 25 willing volunteers in under 2 weeks. This is all academic of course, because I cannot prove it without an issue queue to point people to.

And you are incorrect about letting anyone help, I have tried to become a webmaster to be granted the "right" to +1 marketplace issues. Take a look at my user page and my company's marketplace listing and tell me if you think I have enough of a track record to be trusted with moderating these issues. Instead, I was temporarily banned from d.o. by Gerhard (who did so without any cause other than his anger and his desire to lord his "great" powers over me), called emasculating terms by Heine, and had all of the hours of work that I did going through the backlog of issues that had accumulated in the marketplace queue undone by kiamaluno (or whatever his name is).

But... even if I (and anyone else who wanted) was given this "great responsibility", it still would not make it easier to manage the marketplace requests from the webmasters queue. ATM you can only subscribe to "all issues" or "your issues" to get updates, you cannot (as far as I know) elect to get updates from only one component. Thus, I do not see new requests come in, because I cannot sift through the updates from 1k+ issues in my e-mail box. This is only an issue for people that follow and respond to issues via their subscriptions, but I think that probably includes a good majority of people that I'd ask to help.

We'd have to give out those same admin powers whether or not they are in the webmaster queue or somewhere else.

I'm sure I'm confused here, but why couldn't we create a new role that simply had the right to moderate those posts?

Keeping it in the webmaster queue allows the site maintainers to keep an eye on it and make sure crazy thing aren't happening.

That's funny, cause I could swear nobody was keeping an eye on it. When I went through the queue I found dozens that couldn't get two webmasters approval, and even when they did, it was impossible to get anyone to do anything about it. (see this for one example: http://drupal.org/node/1276700 ).

With regards to a comment made earlier about silence being the same as a "no", this is what a "no" should look like here (i.e. it should be "not yet, but here's what you need to do to get listed..."): http://drupal.org/node/1665120 .

Let's approach it a different way: Alex, can you give us a succinct list of changes that you think need to be made before the marketplace goes live?

I've already listed the steps that I think would get this launched most quickly, but at the most basic level, what I want to see on day 1 of the marketplace is a listing of all the companies that should be listed (but only those companies). I can try and organize a team to work through the issues, but it will be a lot harder without a separate queue, and it will be a lot more confrontational with a system that relies on ratting companies out, rather than leading them along (eg. "post-moderation").

Organizing/people skills are not magic, and I will bet you $1000 that I can gather up 25 willing volunteers in under 2 weeks.

It's one thing to gather volunteers for a one-time thing. It's completely different if you want their time on an ongoing basis. I'm not here to bet, but based on what I've seen of unpaid, volunteer driven, organized efforts in the Drupal community, moving work around is not going to help anything. We need to focus on enabling people to get the work done, and step 0 is defining what people actually need to be doing, hence this issue.

And you are incorrect about letting anyone help, I have tried to become a webmaster to be granted the "right" to +1 marketplace issues. Take a look at my user page and my company's marketplace listing and tell me if you think I have enough of a track record to be trusted with moderating these issues.

I'm going to be bluntly honest with you right now: The reason that you were not allowed to become a site maintainer is because you have a pretty poor attitude about a lot of things. I don't know if you mean it to or not, but a lot of the things that I've seen you post have come across as very abrasive or inflammatory. Reading over #958338: I'd like to join the Webmasters team, I believe that it was made very clear that if you decided to play nicely (level-headed, thoughtful replies without the attitude, anger, combativeness, drama, etc), the application could be reconsidered. When that was not the case, it was won't fixed.

When you make comments like:

If your goal is to keep out outsiders, get as little done towards improving d.o., and make sure 'newbies' feel as unwelcome as possible, then you are succeeding. Letting "newbies" like me help out would certainly be disruptive- I mean, things might even get taken care of, and people might feel a bit less assaulted when they have the misfortune of stumbling onto this issue queue- as I did when I was threatened with a purge.

in an issue where you're asking for admin powers, why in the world would you think you'd get them? I reiterate: you not getting admin powers was never about lack of contributions. It was about your attitude.

But... even if I (and anyone else who wanted) was given this "great responsibility", it still would not make it easier to manage the marketplace requests from the webmasters queue. ATM you can only subscribe to "all issues" or "your issues" to get updates, you cannot (as far as I know) elect to get updates from only one component.

This sounds like a feature request to me. Please open one (or find the existing one), post the issue ID, and I'll see if I can find time to code something up. This would help the core queue as well. Note, however, that this is not a requirement for keeping the issues in the webmaster queue. You can always simply work out of the issue queue (filtered down to what you want).

I'm sure I'm confused here, but why couldn't we create a new role that simply had the right to moderate those posts?

I was saying that whether or not it's the site maintainer role or some new role, we'll have to hand out admin powers to deal with marketplace postings. A new role makes sense to me. This should probably be captured as a new issue, as it will be relevant whether or not the marketplace issues are handled in the webmaster queue or some other queue.

That's funny, cause I could swear nobody was keeping an eye on it.

People are in the webmaster queue all the time. I spend a fairly good chunk of time there myself. The reason that nobody is dealing with the marketplace issues right now is because there's no consensus around the guidelines for dealing with those issues. When this issue is fixed, then people will know what to do with those issues, so we can move forward there.

I can try and organize a team to work through the issues, but it will be a lot harder without a separate queue, and it will be a lot more confrontational with a system that relies on ratting companies out, rather than leading them along (eg. "post-moderation").

If you can organize some people around pre-moderation, and we have consensus about what should be included in the marketplace, then why not? Let's try pre-moderation for a while, then if that doesn't work, we can move it to a post-moderation model.

In the interest of moving this issue along, here's what I see as what we have left to do here:

-----

Tasks:

- Create issue for subscribing to project components
- Create issue for creating a new marketplace moderation role

Need feedback (please vote):

1) Start with a pre-moderation model for both the "All providers" listing and the "Featured providers" listing, with the option of changing to a post-moderation model in the future if pre-moderation doesn't work out so well (ex: lack of people to keep an eye on the queue, too much work, etc.) - Yes, No, or [some other option]
2) Remove the DA membership requirement - Yes, No, or [some other option] (that is, a DA membership can be one component of showing contribution, but could be replaced by, for instance, core/contrib code contributions)
3) Contribution should be a requirement of being listed - Yes or No (if yes, then please define "Contribution" - what would constitute enough contribution to be listed?)
4) Where do we moderate the marketplace listings? Webmaster queue, new marketplace queue, or [some other option]

-----

My votes:

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) Yes; Contribution = any combination (i.e. more than 2) of DA membership, a handful of code contributions, some doc page edits, conference organizing, initiative leadership, contrib maintainership, core maintainership
4) Webmaster queue (in the marketplace component)

I will personally commit to reviewing marketplace issues for one hour per day until the entire initial backlog is worked through.

The reason that nobody is dealing with the marketplace issues right now is because there's no consensus around the guidelines for dealing with those issues.

As a site maintainer following this issue, I can confirm this is my reason for being hesitant with these listings.

My votes regarding #42 (this is when it would be nice to have polls available):

1. yes
2. yes - we also need to be really really clear about this part. I'd like to avoid comments/impressions like this.
3. yes - I agree with cweagans' requirements but would add something about having one or more accounts with a certain (minimum?) amount of time on drupal.org demonstrating no bad (ie against the dcoc) behavior. I find it difficult to understand how a company/person deserves a listing 1 week after signing up for drupal.org. Seems to me most such listings would be from those who have no clue what drupal is other than reading about it in some trade publication/site and wanting to jump on the bandwagon.
4. frankly, doesn't matter to me. But I would think it would be better to leave it where it is for now, approve and document the guidelines, and get the backlog down before making the decision if it needs its own queue.

@43: Though I can see both sides of the pre/post moderation debate (I tend to side on the pre-mod side), imo if we're going test one out first it should be pre moderation. Testing post moderation first leads to more work weeding out garbage listings if we change our minds. Doing it the other way does not. It also seems the more controlled approach (open the flood gate slowly rather than open it wide and try and close it later). And based purely on impressions of working in the webmaster's queue, i tend to be of the opinion there will be many more garbage listings than anticipated.

I will personally commit to reviewing marketplace issues for one hour per day until the entire initial backlog is worked through.

I can commit to 1/2 hour per day for the back log once the guidelines have been clearly documented and approved.

@tvn I have a very big problem with this statement, though it sums up the meat of the issue:

I saw some people are curious about the goal of the Marketplace and the reason to have it in the first place. The primary goal as I see it, is to give those looking for drupal services a place where they can see various (the more - the better) companies providing such services, can easily filter them by location or type of service etc. and find what they need.

This is what the Drupal Services listing's goal is listed as (emphasis added):

We only list individuals and companies that have contributed to Drupal. Contributions to Drupal can take many forms, and the goal of this section is to highlight companies or contractors with a track record of working within the community.

And then you add that another goal is to make the DA money (though I am happy for the honesty). So to sum: less value for contributing companies, more value for non contributing companies as well as various commercial interests, and more financial value to the DA. Would you like to put your proposed changes to the goal of the marketplace--away from a focus on contributions and towards a focus on commercial interests, including the DA's "non profit" interests--to a vote?

Here are my votes to @cweagans (and thank you for pointing this to a reasonable end point) proposed votes:
1- yes
2- yes
3- to quote from Beck, "HELL YES!" But... I would not consider a DA membership to be a form of contribution, or at least not enough to use it as any sort of measuring stick. We're talking about something that is cheap and possibly free, and none of the other items come close to it in terms of ease of attainment. OTOH, I'd be fine with counting some amount of sponsorships as a contribution.
4- A marketplace queue. I understand the reservations about starting another queue, and I'd love to see the d.o. issue queues continue to improve, but as it stands it is extremely hard to keep up-to-date on issues within a queue as massive as the webmasters queue, and I think waiting for that to get fixed is a case of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good". I'm just curious- do all of the core initiatives work primarily in the core issue queue? From my perspective as a business owner, fragmentation and specialization are natural byproducts of organizational growth. They do add their own management issues, but overall they are what's needed to scale any org (again, look at how core has started to become more specialized, with intiatives & initiative owners). If we call this the Marketplace Initiative queue would that ease anyone's concerns?

It also seems the more controlled approach (open the flood gate slowly rather than open it wide and try and close it later). And based purely on impressions of working in the webmaster's queue, i tend to be of the opinion there will be many more garbage listings than anticipated.

My thoughts exactly. It's very easy to give more, but people get upset when you take things away.

I understand the reservations about starting another queue, and I'd love to see the d.o. issue queues continue to improve, but as it stands it is extremely hard to keep up-to-date on issues within a queue as massive as the webmasters queue, and I think waiting for that to get fixed is a case of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good".

IMO, watching this page is no more difficult than watching drupal.org/project/issues/marketplace. I understand that the subscription thing is an annoyance, but who is really going to use email for this? Personally, I try to avoid situations where I'm getting more email - I'd much rather have things in a more structured environment (like a filterable issue queue).

Plus, I don't think we get anything by splitting it into another queue. If we're creating a role for marketplace moderators, then having it in another queue isn't going to make any difference other than further fragmenting the queue. Fragmentation and specialization happen in larger orgs, but we don't have managers to keep track of who's doing what, so we need to try to keep things in one place.

People manage to keep track of the core queue, which is 10x bigger than the webmaster queue. Why can't we do the same?

Would you like to put your proposed changes to the goal of the marketplace--away from a focus on contributions and towards a focus on commercial interests, including the DA's "non profit" interests--to a vote?

But... I would not consider a DA membership to be a form of contribution, or at least not enough to use it as any sort of measuring stick.

I have no problem with Drupal.org efforts benefiting the DA. Alex, I know that you aren't particularly fond of the DA, but you have to admit that Drupalcon is pretty awesome and that lately, the DA has done a lot in the realm of making drupal.org a better place. Qualms with the leadership/decisions aside, supporting the DA helps Drupalcon happen and helps Drupal.org be better. IMO, that's a good cause.

If it helps any, maybe we could say a combination of three of those options that I listed? Or a DA membership and fewer contributions in the other areas (that is DA membership + a couple commits + a couple doc page edits OR more commits + more doc page edits). idk, something like that? I'd really like to encourage people to get DA memberships.

I can commit to 1/2 hour per day for the back log once the guidelines have been clearly documented and approved.

Yeah, that's what I meant =P

Thanks everyone for weighing in on this issue and @cweagans for moving it along.

Here are my votes:

#1 Start with Pre-moderation
Yes. I'm all for pre-moderation of both listings Featured and All. However, the primary reason for post-moderation was because this hasn't happened for years. The clogs in the system date back well before the current marketplace refresh. A lot has changed and perhaps we can move past those clogs. I'm comfortable starting with pre-moderation knowing that capacity issues may push us to a post-moderation system.

#2 Remove DA membership
No. The Marketplace is NOT a revenue generator for the Association - It has never been designed as such. The reason for requiring a DA membership was two-fold.
A) It creates a connection with the business so that we have a phone number and a record of contact with them. Time has shown that people look to the DA as a manager of drupal.org and while we can push them back to the queue we are tying our hands if we are unable to communicate with the business.

B) A membership is a heartbeat. Memberships are required to be renewed annually and when they are not renewed the business may no longer be around or may no longer be using Drupal. This annual renewal process will help keep the queue clean.
Considering that the membership can be had for free I don't see this as a barrier and there are numerous practical benefits to this.

A DA membership is NOT a form of contribution for inclusion in the marketplace. Contributions are code, themes, support, documentation, etc. It's unfortunate that this is what was the impression in the past but it was never the intention then or now. We explicitly put contributions as the #1 factor in the guidelines for both All and Featured listings.

#3) Contribution should be a requirement of being listed
Yes. It's a stated requirement for both the Featured and All. We should foster a culture of contributions to code, themes, support, document, etc. The barrier for All should be low and be high for a Featured listing. Non-contributors should not be listed.

#4) Where do we moderate marketplace listings
Abstain. I trust the webmasters to answer this question.

@jredding

Re #2A: There should be no reason for the DA to communicate with anybody other than DA members, and if they're DA members, then can you not just look at their membership record? In any case, this point is moot, because you can always use the contact form for any of the users associated with an organization. If contact forms are disabled, then you can ask a webmaster to retrieve their email address for you.

Re #2B: There are other ways to manage this. For instance, we could make it so that marketplace posting must be reviewed yearly if there's a lack of activity from the members of the organization (and automate that - it wouldn't be very hard to do, I think).

If you'd rather not have a DA membership a form of contribution, that's fine. I was trying to figure out a way to not require a DA membership, but still encourage it. The more I think about it, the more I agree that DA membership should not be a requirement of getting listed.

Re #3: I know it was listed, but it was brought up elsewhere in the thread, so I figured we may as well put it to a vote. Looks like the general feeling so far is yes, so no worries.

@cweagans and all

Great! It looks like we're all aligned on 1, 3, and 4.

Regarding a DA membership to be listed in the Marketplace:

Having a connection to the businesses in our ecosystem is what keeps the Drupal community strong. A connection helps us guide them through the community, points them to the public issue queue, encourages them to attend local camps and meetups, and to be more integrated in our community. It also allows the DA to use existing processes to monitor the health of the marketplace. For example, when emails bounce someone at the DA tracks that email to the account to see what the problem could be. This is both an automated and a human process.

This is a huge strength for the community that shouldn't be understated, very few other OSS communities have this. The Drupal Association exists to support the Drupal community and we have processes in place to do this, like, as an example, to take care of the tedious and mundane work from the community (for example: checking dead links). When we remove the DA from community processes we weaken its position to support the community.

I strongly prefer that the DA maintain this membership requirement to help all companies understand the need and importance of the DA to the Drupal community. I would hate for this to be removed because a single individual who had a disagreement with a board member decided to filibuster the issue.

A strong Association is vital to the success and longevity of drupal.org and the community particularly as the community grows. It makes it difficult for an Association to support the community when its hands are tied.

I stated before that I feel the DA membership requirement is reasonable. I still believe that. I also note that this website's infrastructure is underwritten by the DA, which in turn is underwritten by members, sponsors, advertisers and DrupalCon proceeds.

The rest of the proposal seems fine to me. My preference is to get it underway and then iterate on the process.

I would hate for this to be removed because a single individual who had a disagreement with a board member decided to filibuster the issue.

Personally, I don't think it should be a requirement either, but I would like to strongly encourage it. This is not just Alex's opinion. I couple people that I spoke with on IRC were of the same mindset: a DA membership should not be a requirement here.

A strong Association is vital to the success and longevity of drupal.org and the community particularly as the community grows. It makes it difficult for an Association to support the community when its hands are tied.

Not having a DA membership as a requirement is hardly tying your hands. It is an opportunity for the DA to demonstrate the importance. I would not be opposed to weighting the listing so that otherwise equal companies would be sorted by whether or not they had DA memberships (with the organizations that DO have memberships showing up before the ones that don't). The people that don't have DA memberships could even be shown a little ad in the sidebar - something to the effect of "Uh oh! It looks like you don't have a DA membership. Join today to get all these great benefits and to help the community grow".

@jredding

re #3: "Contribution" is an incredibly vague word. Have we defined what constitutes acceptable types of contribution? And have we defined a specific number of required contributions, both for the Featured and All list?

re #2: DA membership requires a monetary commitment - is this correct? If so, requiring an organization to pay as a means of inclusion seems incongruous with the entire concept of openness. Simply registering with the DA should be sufficient for creating a "connection with the business".

@andrewKWilson

re #3) The guidelines are a path forward to define what a contribution is

re #2) A membership to the DA can be free, what we are asking is to ensure that the company has a listing in the DA database and is a part of our process of working with companies.

@cweagans

Interestingly enough I don't want to list companies that have a DA membership above those that don't. Specifically this is because I believe that code, documentation, support, theme, design, and other contributions are much more important than financial contributions. Thus I'd prefer to list a company such as Alex's higher than someone with a DA membership. He provides code and employee time to the project, which I believe is more valuable that giving money to the Association.

My reasoning for making a free DA membership a prerequisite for inclusion is to create that connection between the business and the DA. Note that a DA membership does not guarantee inclusion in the marketplace nor should it be considered a contribution to the project. I'm simply stating that if the DA is going to be responsible for places like this on drupal.org and work to support the community we need the tools to do it. Connections to the businesses that are working on drupal.org is a valuable tool for us.

If the webmaster team feels strongly that this should not be a requirement then I will be comfortable taking it out. After all we are here to support the Drupal community, which is the purpose of this thread - we are not making these changes unilaterally this is a discussion to come to consensus on a route forward.

Well, I don't speak for the entire webmaster team, but the other webmasters have been pretty silent here. From what I understand, I'm -1 on that requirement. However:

My reasoning for making a free DA membership a prerequisite for inclusion is to create that connection between the business and the DA.

Maybe we should talk about this a bit more. What is this talk of a free DA membership? This sounds like something that I'm unaware of.

The fact that there's a free DA membership option has been mentioned at least 12 times in this thread, and is also in the original proposal. :(

I know that in some circumstances, a DA membership can be had for free, but jredding is making it sound like it's very commonplace. I know it's been mentioned a lot and there's a link to node/add/project-issue/webmasters in the original proposal, but that still doesn't tell me why. If somebody doesn't want to buy a membership, then they just have to jump through some administrative hoops to get a free one?

This honestly sounds completely pointless. It's a waste of the user's time and it's a waste of a site maintainer's time. Why is email not a good option for communication with the listed providers? We already have email addresses for every single user on drupal.org and it takes minimal effort to retrieve them.

@cweagans

The discussion over free DA memberships was discussed in this thread: drupal.org/node/1103306
We already have a plan in place to offer these automatically for free to (insert price)

The reason why the user account contact form is not an efficient means of communication is because many companies use an office admin or a single employee's account to create the organization listing. That employee or office admin eventually will leave the company. This causes the admins to have to chase down a company representative. If you require a yearly renewal the emphasis is placed on the company to come back and tell the website that they are still alive (otherwise known as paying attention). We learned our lesson with this with the hosting page, many links went dead after a certain period of time. Fortunately we were able to track this because every company listed on the hosting page was within the Association CRM system, which meant we could communicate with the company.

Could we do this on the organization node by adding new fields? Yes, definitely. Then we'd be duplicating a system and a process we already have.

As mentioned if we want to remove this as a requirement I'm not comfortable with it but I will respect the decision. However, I'm offering a way to allow the DA to assist in keeping the list clean but to do that we need to be able to communicate directly with those companies and not through clicking on 100+ contact forms once a year.

I see where you're coming from. Is there some other solution that we maybe haven't considered yet?

It seems like a DA membership requirement isn't ideal, but neither is trying to keep in touch with those companies via email addresses on the associated user accounts.

What about this:

DA membership is optional, but if you don't have it, then the organization node must have an email address populated in a new field. If the DA tries to email that address and it fails, then the node can be unpublished without warning. That way, the onus is on the company to keep it updated. We could even rig up a cron job to remind the node owner every 12 months to make sure that the address on the node is updated. How's that sound?

It's kind of frustrating to watch this conversation play out.

The Drupal Association is responsible for supporting the community, through improvements to our website and infrastructure, through marketing the Drupal project and growing the Drupal community, through throwing DrupalCons, etc.

The Drupal Association is saying, "This is what we need in order to support the project in our mission." We are being told "No." And we're being told no by the same people who will come back to us later and criticize us for not doing enough due to not having the necessary tools to foster our mission. Sigh. :(

I'd like to propose the following compromise with regards to the DA and moving to a Marketplace issue queue. I would have no problem with the DA "owning" the issue queue, so long as *any* Drupal contributor can help moderate the list and queue (webmaster access control included, but many other forms of contribution should also qualify-- i.e. the same things that can get you listed in the marketplace). This way the DA could possibly hire/pay someone to help interact with businesses--both those listed and those that would like to be--and help keep the issue queue, while ensuring that we all can see the truth of our interactions warts and all. We are a strong and flexible community, and we can learn from our mistakes, but not if only a select few are privy to the information. One of the key values of the Drupal community that I have found lacking within the DA is the value of Open, and I'd think it was a great step in the right direction to see you pointing at an open forum for the issues. IMO- all official d.o. marketplace communications should remain within the d.o. issue queue (or g.d.o. group or even a.d.o forum topic, if that's necessary at some future point), no matter who is managing this section of the site.

WRT a DA membership- I still don't want one, for my own philosophical/moral reasons. Would you ask me to eat pork/beef/shellfish (none of which I purposefully eat) to get a listing? From where I sit it's the same thing. @webchick, if you ask me to eat swine for the sake of you and/or drupal, I'll do it, but I wouldn't be very happy about it. Let me rejoin the DA when I personally feel that it aligns with my values. I'm sure it will happen at some point--unlike real apples, when this one is removed from the bunch, the bunch will probably be fine again--but I'd rather not be coerced into joining.

Perhaps we could approach it this way: require DA memberships, but allow for the occasional exception. For instance, in Alex's case, I would love to see Zivtech on the featured companies list, but he doesn't want to get a DA membership, so as long as we have a documented way of getting ahold of him, would that be okay?

btw, I totally agree with keeping everything in a public issue queue.

@alexu_a and @cweagans

All communications about the Marketplace to date have occurred in a public issue queue. There are no current or past plans to remove any of it from the issue queue. All proposed versions of moderation include the issue queue.

All additions to the marketplace happen through a public issue queue

Removals (non-automated) from the marketplace will occur in a public issue queue (i.e. complaints, non-contributions, etc.)

Removals from the marketplace due to an expired annual membership or unresponsive company (i.e. bounced mail and/or lack of action) will happen through the existing DA badge process. When a user's membership expires the badge simply doesn't appear, in this case the node will go unpublished.
- The log message on the node revision will state the reason for being unpublished (ex. "Unpublished due to lack of a response)

Exceptions: Exception can be handled - I'm very comfortable with that. I'm aligned with Alex in that I want people to have a way of stating "Hey.. I don't support that organization - the DA does need to constantly maintains its purpose for existence."

I'm okay with a DA membership requirement if there is a way for people to get an exception for whatever reason. Zivtech contributes a lot and I definitely don't want to set up a system where they're going to be excluded.

Let's see what Alex says. If he's okay with that solution, I don't think there's anything else left to discuss.

** If you cannot afford or choose not to purchase an organization membership, you can apply for a free membership or simply register with the Drupal Association using this form: (link).

Are we all in agreement?

Not quite - evidently, you didn't read the last ~30 comments.

I think where we're at is this:

- Marketplace gets dual listing: "Featured" and "All" providers
- There is a mandatory requirement for community contributions
- There is a mandatory requirement for a DA membership, but exceptions can be made with good reason
- "All providers" must have at least some contributions, "Featured" - providers that contribute a lot and during continuous period of time
- Pre-moderation for all marketplace listings

adding short version

I just wanted to note that the Drupal.org governance sprint recommends splitting this section from the webmasters.

*Split off a separate "Drupal.org content" working group from the "Drupal.org webmasters" working group; different skills/levels of trust are needed for managing the content on Drupal.org versus managing access and performing moderation of abuse.
* Identify a much smaller subset of the Drupal.org webmasters group to form policy for this team. Currently, there are nearly 150 members with "site maintainer" privileges, and they often make and enforce policy on an ad-hoc, individual basis. Community members currently encounter very inconsistent experiences in the queue.
* While the Drupal Association doesn't manage these groups, it's generally expected that the charters of these groups will include directives to collaborate with the DA in their policy-making decisions in order to ensure the financial sustainability of Drupal.org.

To which I say "AMEN!"
So, IMO the conversation about "where" is still germaine, as is the question of "whom" should be doing the moderation...

I'd just like to chime in (after an email from tvn) by saying that I basically agree with the text in the Summary as it is and #65.
As a one man shop, I don't see DA membership as an impediment, but I see DA membership as another way of giving back.

However, try to make it easy for small shops to get a listing, and for people who are looking for a Drupal consulting guy to find one easily close to them geographically (I've had people who wanted me to "hold their hands" with a Drupal site, for just a few hours). Physical proximity seems important to me).

As of this moment in time, it is the responsibility of site maintainers to moderate content, users, access, etc on Drupal.org. If you want to change that, kindly open another issue. This is not the place to discuss it.

@tvn, and that current process is completely stalled. Only a few webmasters seem to care, and fewer willing to walk new companies through the process. I don't think we should make a decision that dramatically affects the Marketplace, while the governance of the resource is up in the air. As the governance post stated "Community members currently encounter very inconsistent experiences in the queue", so I don't think we should put a massive effort into reaching out to these businesses (who may or may not be current community members) before we are certain that they will get a fair and prompt response to their request for addition.

I believe this should be postponed until the governance is in place, and I don't think rushing this at this point will do anything but make whatever transition takes place harder.

Current process is stalled because no one knows what to do, or even what the status of the marketplace is. This situation also applies to other parts that need maintenance.

This should absolutely not be held up on the results of the Governance discussion. Webmasters handle content right now, so that's what we need to run with. If, in the future, that changes, then we can adapt the marketplace process along with everything else.

We've waiting long enough. We need to get the Marketplace online and we need to not piss away more time before we do that. We've all had our say in this discussion, and there's no point in dragging it out any longer. Just get something out the door and we can iterate as needed.

After talking with folks at Capital Camp including a brief discussion with @alexu_a I'd like to move forward with a modified plan of action placing more emphasis on contributions.

All things currently agreed upon we will move forward with - including dual listing for Featured and All listings. All current companies listed on paid-services will be posted on the Featured tab. New entrants must be approved through the issue queue.

The change is to remove the requirement for a Drupal Association membership and replace that with new tools for the moderation team that we (the Drupal Association) will take responsibility for developing.

The new requirements would be the following:
Organization nodes must be kept up to date, at least once a year
A new view and messaging tool will be created to view an organization node's last modified date. When the node's last modified date nears one year old they will be sent an email to update the node. Any update will suffice, it is only to check to ensure the company is still around and providing services (i.e. keep our list clean).

Node's that go unmodified for over a year will be unpublished.

Focus on an organization's contributions
Build out the organization's current profile to list more types of contributions. Currently the list pulls in commits and documentation edits but we'll expand and refine the list and constantly improve it to include off-site items such as community project management, camp/meetup/sprint leadership or marketing initiatives. The list will be a tool and a guide for the moderation team to use to determine entry onto the list as well as promotion to the Featured list.

Over time this will become the metric for retention on the list. Companies that have not contributed in any form for greater than one year will be deemphasized or have their node unpublished.

All work on this list of contributions will be done in the issue queue and checked into the drupal_org module for everyone to review (open metrics, open data). The list of contributions will be expandable and will provide freeform fields so that companies can list off-drupal.org items such as marketing initiatives.

I want us to start moving forward now and iterate over time. By removing the DA membership requirement and building new tools to monitor contributions (great idea @cweagans) I believe we're all in agreement. Thank you everyone for your frank feedback and the great discussion. It's great to work in such an active and vibrant community.

If no one objects we'll start putting up new code by the middle of next week to launch the new marketplace before DrupalCon Munich on August 20th.

+1!

+1000!

great work everyone-- I'm actually looking forward to working on the market place queue rather than seeing it as a chore to be avoided.

+1, sounds great!

So after all this debate and seeming agreement the marketplace has been put live without pre-moderation. Smell the collaboration! Or maybe not. Can someone give an update here?

The code that was pushed live was based on what was agreed in this thread. If it is not functioning as per the agreement here it is a bug and should be fixed.

Are you stating that pre-moderation is *not* working? (will check and work with the d.o team)

was this announced somewhere? Are we ready to begin the 'real' marketplace reviews?

@worldfallz No this was not heavily announced as we didn't want to flood the queue with requests.

@drumm and @tvn put this up over the weekend and have been working with folks at DrupalCon Munich to get the word out.

@alexu_a This is a confirmed bug. I've filed an issue: http://drupal.org/node/1646458

I also closed all issues relating to the publishing of organization nodes for companies previously listed in the marketplace. As far as I can tell all current nodes in moderations are legitimate and are awaiting review.

One was missed: #1693056: Review PINGV. Not sure if there are any others.

I think this issue is now fixed, and I am marking as such. Feel free to reopen if you disagree that consensus has been (finally) reached here. As far as I can tell the debate should now be moved on to the much more fun contentious issue of how much contribution will be required to be listed and how much for featured.

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