What's Working

Jo Walsh

The enthusiasm for creating local chapters - what's being set up in China and India and Germany and Canada - that OSGeo is providing a focus for more people to get together more often and share ideas and do work together - and this will lead to better internationalisation in more software / documentation / data.

The way the Education and Geodata efforts are bringing more people together - there should be open licensed tutorials and books coming out of this - easy data discovery and packaging service. Though early days this has the flavour of a really useful open knowledgebase, make it easier for projects to get their software into peoples hands.

The fact that people are talking more through the incubation process - there is definitely developer cross-pollination - better software for all - perhaps this motivates people to stay in incubation - it is warm and comfortable there - one has friends there. But growing up feels kind of inevitable. More graduated projects = more energy flow.

Tyler Mitchell

The two biggest things that I've been excited to see have been: -promotion/exposure through conferences. The great opportunities Autodesk gave us by sponsoring conferences for us - Where 2.0, OSCON and next month, FOSS4G, EuroOSCON - as well as other conferences that CCGIS helped coordinated -Intergeo and others- have generated a lot of positive energy, especially for members/volunteers who helped make those events happen. Working together has been a very positive experience. It's been great to see and be part of. I think it is working very well, though the Visibility Committee needs more members to help make events happen around the globe. -cross pollination between projects. I haven't been watching the incubation process in detail, but from a general perspective I see projects with mentors from other projects working together. That's really exciting for me to see when I think that apart from OSGeo there wouldn't be a good forum for working together like that.

So, nothing earthshatteringly broken in my opinion - it can all be addressed with a bit of innovation, a plan and some elbow grease. It's always just a matter of time before we get around to it...

Cameron Shorter

constructively together.
 * We have created a healthy, diverse community which works

them down in core documentation.
 * The community has articulated the key values and goals and written

we run into issues, we have shown that we can work together to change. (I'm refering to our ability to work together to refine the incubation process).
 * We have started testing our values by putting them into practice. As

Jody Garnett

- Incubation process is a bottle neck (yes this is on both lists) - Incubation forcing a us to address many issues that have always waited for a driver - publicity at conferences - wiki (as collaborative tool) - IRC channel (meet and greet)

Arnulf Christl

the Mapbender project has profited by having a new requirement resulting from Incubation (learn to use a bug/project tracker). Enhanced visibility, though that obviously is hard to quantify. MB uses the SVN, mailing lists and web space provided by OSGeo. (Sure, we're gonna be movin on soon but its a benefit to have services provided). German speaking users (as well as other languages) start to gather around Local OSGeo Chapters - to what avail will have to work out. But they are gathering.

Community starts to profit (at least that is what a tiny percentage of my business customers say) by having one address to go to when looking for something. We need to make sure people find what they are looking for which seems to be a rather complex task.

Jeroen Ticheler


 * IRC channel and OSGEO-Discuss mailing list are very useful tools to get the diverse geospatial community together and stay informed!