Make it possible to auto-generate these lists from various sources

[patcon]

This is great!

Here are some thoughts -- 🔍 facts, ❤️ feelings, and 💡 ideas -- about this topic.

🔍 Right now, this resource is maintained by PR to each central repo.
🔍 Communicating with projects/orgs about being added to this repo is a separate task from actually adding them -- it is not on the "critical path".
❤️ I feel in favour of tactics that encode the base information in the "branches and leaves" more than the "trunk".
❤️ I feel in favour of tactics of can most obviously involve those being documented in the documentation.
❤️ I feel that multiple ways of getting into this directory is ok.
❤️ I feel a preference for directories built from machine-readable data.

Would love to see approaches like this eventually make it into the maintenance strategy:

Candidate Approaches

• GitHub repo topics. For maintainers to add themselves fairly easily.
• A standard json file that can be searched and parsed. like g0v.json (which powers g0v's search) or civic.json. For maintainers who will accept this sort of PR from others.
• yml file in this repo. For maintainers who are unsupportive or inactive.

[patcon]

Possible GitHub topic format: builtin-* (eg. builtin-toronto, builtin-san-francisco)

[RichardLitt]

Thanks @patcon! I am not sure I am following. Are you suggesting writing a document that we could use to guide users on how to add stuff into this repository, or into any of the other cities? Or are you suggesting research pathways for people to discover this organization, or to discover and add their own content to their city? Or are you suggesting edits to users' projects which reference this org?

The first makes sense to me, but it also depends on the city how they want to operate their website. The second also makes sense - we should talk about how people can help us source more material. And the third is harder; I don't want people to feel the need to add content, and I think that adding irrelevant metadata to a repository may not help much.

Can you clarify?

[patcon]

:)

I'm suggesting that there be multiple paths to be part of these directories, and that the less these paths encourage maintenance of the resource from the center, the better :)

Using GitHub topics, or using standard config files (that can be discovered and indexed here through GitHub search API), are two examples that came to mind, but for sure not the only ones. For sake of conversation, pretend that standard config is opensourcecities.json, although I imagine there's already a existing spec that this could leverage (akin to g0v.json or civic.json, mentioned above.)

I've stubbed out an example layout of how that might work in practice:
opensourcecities/toronto@master...patcon:reorg-for-scripts

So for actionable (if you're down with the premise): A step one here could be to auto-generate these READMEs from our own yml/json file.

To be clear -- I'm still not sure if opensourcecities is the project I'm able to commit more energies to, but I just wanted to share these thoughts on structural changes to how it's maintained and built :) ❤️

[RichardLitt]

@khos2ow You might want to be in this conversation, too!

[patcon]

[patcon]

fwiw, I feel that what we're talking about here could just as easily be aligned with the "awesome list" movement -- though they're often curated, some are pretty inclusive of whoever asks. Perhaps there's a general pattern or toolset? Maybe a cookiecutter template or something

As a bonus, machine readability of this directory and similar ones would allow others to aggregate the lists in other forms, or resurface them and incorporate them into other places

[khos2ow]

Thanks @patcon for the suggestions. I really liked the topic and standardized file in the root of repos. Although this second one would be a long shot to become attractive and popular.

But we need to make it going in the first place to attract more people to join. Such as Montreal repo got the -good enough- momentum. There are somethings need to be ironed out (such as this issue or opensourcecities/montreal#36).

[patcon]

Oh man, I hadn't seen Montreal's! That's wild! You're way ahead of my thinking! 🎉

[khos2ow]

There's always room for improvements :) We're far from being finished!