Should we change our organisation and/or software name for consistency with GOHSC?

[carlhiggs]

Hi @global-healthy-liveable-cities/ghscic-study-executive

The way we named ourselves as a team has evolved over the course of the project, and so has the name of our software. The problem with this is, we have multiple names and acronyms now floating around on our software-related sites.

Now that our code has become a more coherent software package with documentation has been more fleshed out, and interest is picking up in the 1000 Cities Challenge, I wonder if we should consider changing the name of our software organisation before things get bigger?

There are pros, cons, and workarounds to this if we were to do it; it might make our resources easier to find and more trusted if we had a more consistent brand identity (eg GOHSC, or healthysustainablecities), but in the short term there could be some disruption to existing published links. We might be able to work around that by retaining/archiving current repositories and redirecting to the new one, if we did do it.

So, I thought I'd start this poll/discussion to see what you think about changing our organisation and/or software names used on Github and Dockerhub to match our other identities:

Here are the current names we variously use to refer to ourselves:

• Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators Collaboration (GHSCI / GHSCIC)
  • this is the name that I use to refer to our network; I think we used in the Lancet series
  • most recently our software refers to itself as GHSCI
• Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC)
• healthysustainablecities (our URL for the GOHSC; https://healthysustainablecities.org)
• global-healthy-liveable-cities
  • our GitHub organisation; https://github.com/global-healthy-liveable-cities)
  • our software documentation website (https://global-healthy-liveable-cities.github.io/)
• globalhealthyliveablecities (our Docker organisation; https://hub.docker.com/orgs/globalhealthyliveablecities)

Of the above, I like healthysustainablecities for clarity and consistency as an organisation name, if we were to change it --- this would mean our set of URLs would be consistent with our GOHSC site, being:

• https://healthysustainablecities.org (Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities)
• https://github.com/healthysustainablecities (Github organisation; I didn't want someone else to get this, so I just registered it! just in case)
• https://healthysustainablecities.github.io/ (our software documentation Github Pages site)
  • https://go.healthysustainablecities.org (we have discussed redirecting our software documentation website --- we could use a subdomain to do this I think, and 'go' is an obvious and memorable one, perhaps moreso than 'software')

For the software itself, it has been referred to variously as

• global-indicators (the repository name on Github and in earlier documentation)
  • a good thing about this name is it doesn't have an acronym
  • perhaps it is unfocused though (our tool is designed for a specific type of indicator for healthy, sustainable cities)
• Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators (GHSCI; how its refered to in current documentation
• GOHSCI (a typo in a recent group e-mail from one of our collaborators)
  • I actually like this -- something like Go Healthy and Sustainable Cities Indicators (GOHSC indicators)
  • so, instead of global-indicators our repository could be gohsc-indicators (keeping the GOHSC branding)

Anyway -- there are complications involved in doing the above, but if we are to change name, its probably better to do it before we publish our software paper and get any bigger.

Our current organisation/software is: global-healthy-liveable-cities/global-indicators

I think my pick is healthysustainablecities/healthysustainablecities as it avoids acronyms yet is consistent with GOHSC branding and a possible go.healthysustainablecities.org domain.

I'd love to know, what do you think?

[gboeing]

Thanks Carl. I agree we should change our branding here for consistency. I've cast a vote.

[moudon]

I agree with the proposed change. Thank you Carl!

[carlhiggs]

Hi all,
We've now migrated our repository as discussed above:
https://github.com/healthysustainablecities/global-indicators

Thanks all and @gboeing for the guidance on repo transferral!