I’ve been raising it on Matt Stempeck’s workshop on PDF CEE. What are the goals that are behind catalog creation and what are its users.
Matt was mentioning that the main goal behind Civic Tech Field Guide was to have data that allows to evaluate how civic tech sector is growing and/or failing, with donors as the main recipients.
Looking at the projects I’ve been involved:
TransparenCEE’s catalog (https://transparencee.org/community/) goal was mainly to raise the visibility of projects in CEE that might not have English translations/about pages. I’m doubting have we reached this goal via catalog, it doesn’t have a lot of viewers. Workshops and talks on PDF CEE, as well as topical facilitated working groups were imho a lot better way to highlight these initiatives. Personally, the process of building this catalog has brought me a lot more of value than the end effect - throughout it I have been connecting to new initiatives and learning more insights about the ones I know briefly.
Code for Poland’s project catalog (https://codeforpoland.org/projects/) was there to bring volunteers to projects. It is working, each week we are CCed on a few “I want to contribute” emails sent via website.
In my work, I personally use such catalogs to check for projects in a given topic that I could reuse instead of writing something from scratch. What I’m missing though is the basic information how easy it is to replicate such project (number of deployments, there locations, open source? good documentation?)