Providers versus Users

[smit1678]

Starting a discussion around the user experience and data management of providers and users.

Our goals for user account are to enable easier uploading and contributing as well as enable Provider pages. These user accounts can upload images and define the "Provider" of those images -- i.e. their own company or the original organization that collected the imagery. Currently, we're showing that the "Provider" of the imagery is the User, in addition to keeping the original provider data field in the metadata. For each user, we're then linking the imagery and enabling a user page with a profile.

Two challenges I see with this:

1. We're missing the concept of a Provider page and filtered views of providers. User pages are critical but do we want to have Provider pages as well?

2. Multiple users from the same Provider Organizations. Do we want to have one single Provider page instead of two User Pages?

@tombh Is this the right assessment; am I missing anything? Another immediate question I have is do we want to link users to providers instead of images with users? Those users can then edit the Provider profile page. Would this probably require finishing out a /providers endpoint? We could back fill existing providers and users and then automatically add users to a new provider when they contribute a new provider.

cc @mojodna @brendangatens @sharkinsspatial