Project Evaluation Criteria

= Document Status =

Version: 2.0alpha1

Status: draft

Last Edited: January 5, 2014

= Purpose =

The purpose of this document is to outline the criteria to be used for prioritizing projects for acceptance into the incubation process. The project must fully meet, or be capable of meeting by graduation, the Required Criteria. Projects should meet some or all of the Desirable Criteria. The intention is that the more criteria a project meets, the more likely it will be accepted for incubation.

= Criteria =
 * 1) The code is under an OSI approved license (data & doc projects need to specify their choice for a type of license).
 * 2) The project is willing to keep code clear of encumbrances.
 * 3) The project is "geospatial", or directly in support of geospatial applications.
 * 4) The project is committed to work to address requirements of OSGeo's Project Graduation Checklist.

= Desirable =

The following are desirable traits of projects entering into the community:
 * 1) Open source software is already reasonably mature (working quality code).
 * 2) Project already has a substantial user community.
 * 3) Project already has a substantial and diverse developer community.
 * 4) Project has contributions and interest from more than just one company/organization.
 * 5) Project members are aware of, and implements support for, relevant standards (ie. OGC, etc).
 * 6) Project has linkages with existing foundation projects.
 * 7) Project fills a gap related to software that the foundation supports.
 * 8) Project is prepared to develop in an open and collaborative fashion.
 * 9) Project has contributions and interest from more than just one company/organization.

= Questions =
 * 1) Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.
 * 2) Please provide the names of co-project owners (if any).
 * 3) Please provide the names and entity affiliation of all official committers.
 * 4) Please describe your Project.
 * 5) Why is OSGeo Incubation good for your project?
 * 6) What type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):
 * 7) Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.
 * 8) Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.
 * 9) Please explain how your project will use an open governance policy, ensuring decisions are made, documented and adhered to in a public manner.
 * 10) Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?
 * 11) What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?
 * 12) How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?
 * 13) How many people have commit access to the source code repository?
 * 14) Approximately how many users are currently using this project?
 * 15) What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?
 * 16) Do you wish to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure? If so, what?
 * 17) Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent?
 * 18) Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?
 * 19) Does the project include an automated build and test?
 * 20) What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)
 * 21) What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?
 * 22) What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?