Change title of "Countries served" vocabulary to "Locations"

Hi tvn,

I agree the current setup is "broken" by over abuse. Renaming it to locations sounds ok to me.
No objections from me there. Removing "Worldwide" also makes sense.

However by doing this some companies that only have 1 office but do work in multiple countries do not get any exposure anymore.
Maybe we can add a extra field to identify they can also "Tele-commute" showing they do remote work as well.

This allows the country view to be more clean but still show that companies can work in other places as well?

Also if we do this change, how do we go about enforcing this policy? At the initial promotion we could check of course, but the listings can be edited by the authors at any time to start abusing this again.

As to your last question, I think it is ok to set it to "none" and then update authors.

Can you tell me what will constitute having a "location"? If we're just talking about having an employee in that state then it seems to me that this will favor virtual teams, since they'll be able to advertise themselves in many locations, over non-virtual teams that might work in the same markets. Also, given that we are an international community and many of our businesses do work across the globe (we just launched a site for a Swiss organization and finished up a product build for a Norwegian company) this doesn't really seem to make much sense to me as is.

Also- given that we already have a "headquarters" field, is this even necessary at all?

@Alex UA;

The point is that right now "countries" or "locations" represent nothing, when you have companies like "Code Enigma".
See screenshot; They are doing business in Egypt and French Polynesia? Yeah right. They are based in the UK.

I'm based in The Netherlands but we did work for the UN in "Kenya, Nairobi". Remotely of course.
But I do not think that my company should be listed in that country as a service provider.

Right now for my own company I might have over selected a bit. But I have all business or relations in some form there.

So if 10+ companies select every possible option. It does not represent anything anymore. And it is worthless for possible clients to find a local provider.

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Also an question about those 2 projects in Swiss and Norway you mention. Were that 2 remote projects?
Or did you have staff in those countries close to the clients?

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If I would take your argument of "virtual teams" to the extreme, why do we bother allowing companies to be listed in specific countries?
We then could also just remove that field entirely, also solving this issue.

But then again there are companies that no operate remotely.

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Maybe a middle solution can be to rename "Worldwide" option to "Working for remote clients" and add an extra option "Online service"?

In that list the companies that do "remote work" can be listed. Which then will be a very long list. But that is ok, as you possibly compete with every other "remote" company in the world.

And for the country lists, we might be able to setup some criteria to be able to select specific countries;

- Have an office presence
- Have a team member that also does "sales" ? (As you might have developers there, but should you really belong to that country if you only have developers?)
- ?

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Looking forward to tvn and Alex UA's feedback.

We have now worked for three different Swiss organizations- one of them we worked on-site (CERN, a training), while the other two we worked completely remotely for. We never went on-site for the Norwegian company, but they brought their entire team to Philly for a week to work on-site with us.

Again, this is an international world, so it makes little sense to have a facet for "locations" that isn't the same as "headquarters" (or, maybe, physical offices). But, even if we're talking about hqs, how is it helpful at all to have the entire US market covered by one facet? IMO that's no more useful than putting "Europe" as a single facet (according to the data I could find U.S. GDP is roughly equivalent to the entire EU). While the US may seem monolithic to outsiders, our experience has been that we do more work in Switzerland than in the Southern parts of the US, and more than the majority of US States (I'd say we've done more work than for the swiss orgs than all but 6-7 US states). Here's a map that I believe breaks the US economic regions down in a sensible way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png . Looking at that map I can see that we've really only done work in 4 or 5 of those "Megaregions", with the vast majority occuring in the Megaregion we are headquartered in (the Northeast, which also accounts for at least 1/4 of the US GDP, at least the last time I checked). With regards to other regions, we've done more work in Switzerland, Taiwan, and Norway than we've done in any of the Southern megaregions (I guess Southerners still don't really like us Yanks, and the feeling is mostly mutual).

So... if we're stuck on the idea of including geography as an indication of work areas then I like the idea of limiting it to a certain number (and ten seems fair), but I also would like the US to be broken down by economic regions or states. Otherwise I think we should just remove "locations served", as it's not going to be terribly useful (at least here in the US) unless it's a lot more specific.

@tvn, again, I think there is an non-US bias at work here. Unless you allow for the specification of states or (preferably) regions, this is useless for a US search. If it really is just physical offices, then why not just use the headquarters field (renamed to "offices"), and maybe allow for more than one entry. If we used real addresses we could also add a map to the page at some point...

Also, I'm guessing 99% of Drupal companies "work for remote clients"--actually, I'd guess "works locally only" would have 0 shops--so this is not descriptive or useful.

@Alex UA,

What I am writing here is not ment to be offensive, but to supply counter weight to your "non-US" bias comment.

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I would have to disagree on a "non-US" bias here. I understand your point, as USA is big and has a bunch of states.

In my opinion your almost doing a "pro-US" bias here. Thinking the US is so big, that we would need a split on states, just because the countries in Europe (rest of the world) are smaller and Europe as a hole is equal to the US.

But if we would go down that path, then we would have to do that for every country.

For example China has 22 provinces; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China
And Brazil has 26 states; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Brazil

We would even have to do that then for The Netherlands, which is geographically tiny, but still has 12 Provinces.

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So my suggestion is to stick to the "Country" level defined by the UN or the Countries module.
I think all is lost if we go into state/province level.

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And about working "remote / locally", I know at least 3 Drupal Shops that only work locally by choice.
While that would be a minority section, we have to ask our selves,

What is the goal of the services list?

Just 1 big list with service providers or some classification? I think the last, as we have several facets.
And "Country" level is a good one in my opinion.

All we need to do is define at what criteria. If Alex UA has more precise criteria that allows him to qualify for Swiss and norway even though being based in USA.
That is fine with me. What I am thinking is something like this;

• Completed at least 3 major projects in Country X
• Done work valued at level X in Country X

I prefer the first option and not the revenue option. But just thinking out loud here.

I'm fine with only putting U.S. so long as you are fine with explicitly pointing out that this taxonomy is really for non-us firms. I'll state it again- the US is not a single market, it is a country made up of several distinct economic regions. I'll state again: if we're going with only "US" then we should only go with "EU" for Europe. It's no more or less helpful for an organization in Texas to look for firms via a "US" facet than for an Dutch org to look for firms via a "EU" facet. I

@j.slemmer, again I don't think you understand the US really. The Dutch states would be roughly equivilent to counties/municipalities within US States. Our states are roughly equivalent to your countries, at least from an economic stand point--for example, my state, PA, has roughly the same GDP as your country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states_and_countrie...(nominal) )--but even that misses the point, since my state sits in 2 distinct megaregions (in the West of our state we are part of the Mid-west/Great Lakes region, in the East we are part of the NE Corredor). And while I could see 2 regions in the Netherlands (the Randstad + whatever isn't inside of the circle), other countries might have more regional focuses (for example, Germany seems a bit divided between its different areas, at least culturally). As far as China goes, that may be a valuable distinction, so may be worth investigating. I'm guessing India has a similar situation, given how much difference there is between the regions.

Anyway, I know Europe is a bit divided at this point, but you shouldn't let your historical differences with your neighbors get in the way of us lumping you all together. Either that, or we shouldn't let European misunderstanding of the US economy lead to our nation becoming a monolith. ;-)

Euh....

Yes, our historical differences should get in the way of you lumping "us" all together. Until we merge our "countries" as a state into a future "EU" country that should get in the way. (Which I am hoping for that it someday will happen, but not anytime soon)

Yes, our "provinces" (not states) are tiny compared to USA states.
But it is not about Size, GDP or other comparable element.

It is about country borders in my view and not about states or even (semi-official) economic "clusters".

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As a reply to this;

I'm fine with only putting U.S. so long as you are fine with explicitly pointing out that this taxonomy is really for non-us firms.

I'll state it again- the US is not a single market, it is a country made up of several distinct economic regions.

This implies there are no other countries that can be in the same situation like the US. Large countries, that have states/provinces where other countries could fit into. See; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area

If we take the top 11 (and then excluding antartica), would we write "that this list is really for non-US, non-Russia, non-India, non-China, non-Canada, non-Kazakhstan" ?

That doesn't work, so then I come done to a the most common denominator, which is based on country level.

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So if we add something like; "List does not consider states/provinces and is purely based on country level" ?

This discussion still does not get us closer to defining "criteria" for allowance for being listed under a specific country.

and again, I'm not saying that US companies could not be listed under EU or other countries.
Sure they can, if they comply to the criteria we still have to define together.

@j.slemmer- how exactly does what I wrote imply that other countries economic regions aren't important facets when I specifically stated that it might make sense in other countries (I noted as examples China, India, and possibly Germany)? And you all might not be a single country (yet), but you are a single economic unit (notice how you don't have to get your currency changed when you go to Germany?). Anyway, this seems like an area that should be put aside until we can do something more useful with the data...

I also think it's a bit odd to say that this doesn't have to do with economics and markets when we're talking about a marketplace...

I'm fine with only putting U.S. so long as you are fine with explicitly pointing out that this taxonomy is really for non-us firms.

For me this states a US centric viewpoint. I would have written it with the other of the possible "non-Useful Countries on this list".
But in post #10 you mentioned countries that might have a similar issue. That is true.

And yes, we are an economic unit with one currency, but that does not make us "one" country yet (unfortunately).

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Anyway, this seems like an area that should be put aside until we can do something more useful with the data...

What do you mean with this Alex? You want to put this issue on-hold? Or ?

I think this is the best approach on the short term.

Please link then new issue for the update function here and do we need to update documentation somewhere?

Will work on this coming weekend.

Committed with #1780060: Update function for Countries served vocabulary change.