Recommended Church IT Vendor/Partner List Ideas?

There are more and more churches looking for reputable IT service and product vendors that are ministry focused or at least very friendly towards churches/ministries.  There are also great ministry focused vendors looking to provide a great service/solution to churches/ministries at a great price.  The challenge is how to get the 2 sides together for a win-win?

I know from my own experience that I give a LOT of weight to vendors/products that I know other Church IT peers are using successfully.  Case in point: we’re looking very closely at Ruckus Wireless from Mirazon because of strong recommendations from Daryl Hunter.  I’m not alone, when I asked other’s in the CITRT IRC channel they all had a similar reply:

“I would be more likely to investigate those products and vendors ... especially if i hadn't heard of them or thought of them” – ccnash-scott

So … what’s the best way to create a list of Church/Ministry friendly IT partners/vendors … how/who would submit the vendor/partner … how could others then comment pro/con on their experience with said vendor/partner … maybe give it a star rating? … maybe something similar to Amazon and eBay comments/ratings?  How and how much do you moderate?  Allow anonymous feedback?  etc etc etc!

Does something like this already exist we might want to leverage?  May we can somehow create something inside our upcoming CITRT getshadetree release?  Someone in IRC mentioned this Wordpress plugin http://www.wpreviewsite.com/ Certainly looks interesting.

Already got some good feedback/ideas from a few IRC peeps like “allow anyone to submit a vendor/solution to the list, but require 2 or 3 people to vote “yes” before it gets approved”

Now it’s your turn.  What would be helpful to you from an IT role or vendor role?  Dream big and let’s see what we end up with :-)

Comments

[CindyK]

Wow, I love this idea! As an IT department of one, a list of this kind would be invaluable. A great chunk of my time is used to research vendors and products. I follow many of your blogs and glean precious information from them which saves me time and gives me valuable input.

I also use the Spiceworks Vendor/Product rating and review system (They use stars and written reviews) but for me, info from CITRT folks has always trumped information gathered elsewhere.

I have grown to greatly respect my fellow CITRT members and wish I had more to contribute but rarely have the time. :) In this way I could not only gain info, but pass along my own experiences with products and vendors in a quick and easy way.

I like the way Spiceworks does it - though it may be too intricate to start with. Spiceworks allows you to review not only vendors, but specific products assigning them stars and writing personal reviews - then it gives you the average of the star ratings and allows you to peruse the reviews.

Great idea, thanks!

[Patrick]

Old post, I know, but you could always set up a free http://uservoice.com/ page... it would handle it digg-style with commenting.