OpenEI:Organization Re-Org

Current Structure

The following diagram maps the organization structure currently in OpenEI (7.20.2010).

A couple items of note:

• All Companies, Research Institutions, Financial, Networking, Policy Organizations are in Category:Clean Energy Organizations.
• Organization has its own form.
• Utility Company uses part of the Organization form.
• Utility Company is separate from Category:Companies. This was done to avoid labeling Utility Companies as Category:Clean Energy Organizations (see item above).

Problems with Current Structure

This structure presents the following problems:

• Organizations created with the Form:Organization can get "lost" within the wiki, as there is no good way to differentiate them from other Organizations.
• Category:Utility Companies does not inherit from Category:Companies.
• All Companies, Research Institutions, Financial, Networking, Policy Organizations are in Category:Clean Energy Organizations. Only organizations selected as "clean" should be in Category:Clean Energy Organizations.

Suggested Structure

In order to address these problems and better organize the organization structure, the below diagram suggests a re-org of the structure.

Primary changes are:

• Organization does not have its own form.
• Category:Utility Companies inherits from Category:Companies.
• Category:Government Organizations is added. (Existing Category:U.S. Dept. of Energy National Laboratories inherits from this category).
• Category:Clean Energy Organizations is no longer a default for all orgs. Instead it is specified per org.
• Category:Traditional Energy Organizations has been added.

Steps to Implement Suggested Structure

Steps to achieve this re-org:

• Create new independent Form:Utility Company (and Template:Utility Company) that does not depend on Form:Organization.
• Query (with ReplaceText) for all orgs that are using Template:Organization. Change them to Utility (or other) Companies.
• Remove Form:Organization (and Template:Organization).
• Designate Category:Utility Companies to inherit from Category:Companies.
• All Companies, Research Institutions, Financial, Networking, Policy Organizations currently in the system should be given template parameter "Category=Clean Energy Organizations". Likely will require using a bot.
• Clean up "Clean Energy" queries to make sure Category:Clean Energy Organizations is included in the query.
• Create Category:Traditional Energy Organizations.
• Create Form:Government Organization (and Template:Government Organization).