Hosted organizations

The old map and its grey dots (institutions, organizations)

Dataverse oldtimers like me remember this old map of installations that included grey dots. This screenshot is from https://github.com/IQSS/miniverse/issues/65

What are these grey dots? They are "institutions" hosted by Harvard Dataverse (that's what the code calls it, see this JSON file).

The idea was to show on a map that a single installation of Dataverse can host data for many, many organizations. As of this writing, DataverseNO hosts 17 organizations and Borealis hosts 75.

How can we do something similar with the map we use today?

Possible solutions

Option 1: Base a hosted organization on a collection

• Every hosted organization must have a collection
• For that organization's collection, store in the database the following
  • latitude/longitude at minimum
  • possibly other information that might be useful on a map (description, etc.)
• The UI for this could be part of the "edit collection" page
• Create an API that exposes the hosted organizations
• Have the Hub aggregate all hosted organizations from each of the known installations
• Update the map to show a dot for each hosted organization around the world

Option 2: Each hosted organization is decoupled from a collection

Similar to the above but we'd store the data differently and have a dedicated UI, possibly part of the superuser dashboard.

Other ideas

• RORs have information about locations

Impact

Once the API rolls out to installations of Dataverse around the world and those installations start to enter the data for their hosted organizations, we can get a much better picture of how many organizations are using Dataverse. 🎉

Discuss

See the design doc.

Start with the linked design doc and the current installations map at dataverse.org/installations, then compare the collection-based and decoupled organization options. Define the hosted-organization data, API, Hub aggregation, and map changes; done means installations can publish organizations and the map can display them.