[Clipart] Help for openclipart.org

[Bryce Harrington]

From: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.org>
To: clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Subject: Re: [Clipart] Help for openclipart.org
Reply-To: 
In-Reply-To: <20060707165412.8B6069EA98 at gabe.freedesktop.org>

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 09:54:12AM -0700, Open Clip Art Library Feedback Form wrote:
> Hello!
>  
> I am willing to spend time to program on the site openclipart.org. My
> name is Carsten Schmitz, I am 34 from Germany and at the moment I am
> involved in an open source project named PHPSurveyor.

Hi Carsten, welcome aboard!  As a first step, join the mailing list,
which is where we hold most discussions.  You may also find the archives
of interest, to catch up on recent discussions.
  
> I came to openclipart.org by looking for application icons and I was
> able to use a great amount of icons for that. Additionally i learned
> to manipulate the svg grpahics mysql. Anyway.. I am a PHP and Delphi
> programmer with alot of epxerience. 

Excellent, yes, PHP skills are going to be very important for getting
OCAL transitioned over to ccHost.  Most of us that maintained the old
site are more Perl-oriented so haven't been able to sort through all the
ccHost coding tasks.

> From my point of view the site already has alot of good things. And
> most things do not look so bad ( except for the partly broken
> incoming files).
> I am willing to sort incoming files, keyword these and put them in
> the according folders. I would be willing to make releases too (on
> sf.net)..
> Since I am a coder too i could fix the most necessary things and even
> write a program or two to make wrapping up releases a breeze.

Cool, yes we have scripts for fixing things up, like removing dupes,
fixing wrong keywords, yada yada.  So fixing those, or replacing them
with more powerful scripts would be an effective way of solving the
problem of staying on top of the incoming queue.  Seriously, just
dealing with the onslaught of (quite excellent) submissions each month
has been quite an ordeal; quite a few of us got worn out after just a
few releases.

That said, we're pretty sure that the best path out of the problems is
to get ccHost hooked up, because it gives us a better way to prevent
these issues from entering the library in the first place.  For
instance, we could have sets of PHP routines that check for problems
during submission, like if the keywords match existing keywords, or if
the metadata has been filled out properly, etc.  It'll also provide ways
for people to participate in reviewing/categorizing/fixing clipart
online.

The thing that's been slowing us down is that only a few CC people are
sufficiently knowledgeable in PHP to write these things.  Jonadab and
myself are more Perl-oriented.  Sounds like your PHP skills are better
than ours, and that you're well motivated, so if you're interested, I'd
love to encourage you to look at helping with the ccHost migration
work.  I think we can eliminate a whole host of issues once we've
completed migration to that.
  
> It would be shame if this site would run out of power.  It is a great
> project and should continue to live. 

Yes, agreed.  We definitely need new blood.  Rejon and I have been so
tied up with other things that we've barely been able to even just
answer OCAL emails.
  
> So..what do you think of my suggestion? If you accept it would be
> great if I get access soon since I have some time on my hand because
> of a recent small surgery and I am the completely off for the next
> week. 

Please send me offlist:  Name, preferred username and alternate
username, ssh2 key, and gpg pubkey, and I'll put in the request to get
you registered.

Bryce