[RFC] geographical, etc. info about kde developers and more

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

hi,

while trying to find somebody to drive to linuxtag with (still searching
- anybody from berlin and south/east of it is welcome to contact me :)
i found it rather hard to find the people, although i'm quite sure they
exist. :/
so i think it would make sense to have a database with some personal
data about the people somehow involved in kde.

to the technical side ... we already have two task-oriented databases in
cvs: kde-common/accounts and bugs/Maintainers.xml. one thing to note
about them is, that they constantly suffer from inconsistency (people
update their mail address here and forget it there). based on the theory
of databases, we should aim at something like this:
- a person table
   full name 
   email address(es)
   irc nick(s)
   geographical info (accuracy levels from nothing to full address
     possible)
   languages (possibly differentiated by level)
   birthday (accuracy levels from nothing to exact minute possible) :)
   home page link
   people interview link (oh, well, if this table is extended enough,
     the page could be completely built from it :)
  the technically non-vital info would of course be optional, although i
  would urge people to provide remotely useful info.
- a mailing list table
   full name (is "KOffice Developer List" or "KOffice Developers"
     preferable?)
   description
   restrictions - maybe, just a part of the description
   email address
   subscribtion link
   archive link
- a project table. based on the current Maintainers.xml, but:
   * no maintainer-email. instead, "maintainer type" (person or list).
     together with "maintainer name" it is used to key the proper person
     or mailing list.
   * additional field "project home page"
   * additional field "irc location" ([server:]channel)
- a cvs-account table. mostly the current "accounts", but without the 
  email-address.
  alternatively this table could be left out and the cvs account could
  be made an optional field in the person table, but this would require
  using it as a secondary key in the loginfo.pl script.

the advantages are obvious, but
- who except me wants this? would anybody enter his data into the
  system?
- who is going to implement it? i volunteer for the core part, but need
  support from the maintainers of the affected web pages and other
  services.
- technical questions remain (use a real database or (xml-)files in cvs, 
  etc.?)

greetings

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