[Epic]: Improve the Mobility Database Add Feed Process

[davidgamez]

Description

The current Mobility Database add feed process requires several manual steps before a feed submitted through the website can be reviewed, added, and published. This creates extra work for the team, slows down publication, and increases the risk of errors.

This epic aims to improve the process by automating key steps, giving contributors better visibility, and defining how the GitHub catalog and web interface should work together in the future.

Goals

• Reduce the time from feed submission to publication.
• Reduce manual work and common errors.
• Provide contributors with visibility into the status of their submission.
• Define a future vision for unifying the GitHub catalog and the web interface.

Scope

• Review the current add feed workflow.
• Identify manual steps that can be automated.
• Define the desired future workflow.
• Improve contributor-facing status visibility.
• Create follow-up implementation issues.

Success Criteria

• Key manual steps and error-prone areas are identified.
• Automation opportunities are prioritized.
• Contributors have a clearer way to track feed submission status.
• A future direction for the GitHub catalog and web interface is documented.

[jbruechert]

As an end user of this process, I'd ask you to consider whether the current log in requirement is strictly necessary.
Creating the account currently just adds friction without really verifying the quality of the contribution.
Maybe a few automated quality checks would be more useful to ensure the quality of submissions.

Another point of friction I see is the CLA on GitHub. Given the license is already quite permissive, what is the real advantage of requiring it, given re-licensing should be already be possible to a huge list of compatible licenses?

An opportunity for automation I see:
For example for semi-automatically approving official feeds, one option might be to ask agencies to add a small meta tag to their website listed as agency_url to verify control over the domain, or sending a verification mail to the listed e-mail address. Then only the domain needs to be verified manually.

[ianktc]

Hi @jbruechert, thanks for bringing up these points! We require the user to login to an account so we can monitor submission sources. This is actually a process that consumers have requested us to follow to better assess feed officialness. Down the road, it will also allow us to automatically notify the submitter once the feed has been successfully imported.

Thanks for pointing out the friction with the CLA! We will remove it from the mobility-catalogs because the CLA is mainly for code contributions which we are not expecting for this repo.

As for detecting the official feed, we are considering things like checking the URL domain certificate, or checking the submitter's email domain. We will also explore adding a growable allow-list and disallow-list for domains that are considered official and un-official. In cases where it is ambiguous, we do reach out to the listed email address to ask if the feed is official, although sometimes the response can be slower.