Mapbender

Mapbender is a backend for client development and deployment with multi-client capable user management and security framework for OGC standardized services. The main point of information is the managed Wiki at http://www.mapbender.org/. Find all further information there.

OSGeo Incubation and Graduation
Mapbender is an officially graduated OSGeo Project. Read the Mapbender Incubation Process Documentation and Rovenance review:
 * Mapbender Incubation Progress
 * Mapbender Provenance Review

Read more about the Incubation Process on the Incubation Committee page. Find more details of incubation efforts of all OSGeo Projects on the category page.

Community
Mapbender has its roots in Germany and is still mostly being used in German language countries, increasingly also all over Europe. In an effort to better coordinate development all current core commiters and power contributors met in Bonn to discuss the roadmap, current issues, code conventions, use of libraries, etc. in Bonn, Germany. The agenda and first results can be found on the corresponsing Wiki page.
 * Mapbender Development Sprint Spring 07

The development team is interested in connecting more with the international developer community. One hurdle is the language barrier and the fact that most developers work and live within a 200km radius in Germany. This makes meeting easy but makes connecting with more remote people more difficult. Efforts have been done to open communication to the "rest of the world" by at least keeping the developer's list in English language and starting up an IRC channel but there time zones make it hard to communicate.

It is virtually impossible to prevent the user's list to communicate in German a lot as most people involved talk German as their mother tongue and English only as an unfamiliar foreign language. Even the communication between Bulgarians, Polish, Hungarian, Italian and Dutch users oftentimes is easier in German than in English. This fact is sometimes hard to convey to English native speakers. Funny enough another foucs of activity is in South America (Spanish and Portuguese) due to tutorials conducted there and partnerships with university and companies there.

Each and every chance to meet with other Mapping Client projects is being taken (be it FOSS4G, Where 2.0, personal contacts, etc.) but it was never really possible to really do more than shake hands and promising to be friendly. Hopefully to OpenLayers integration will open up interst in Mapbender to a broader international community.