OSGeo Community Projects

OSGeo Labs Projects

Purpose

OSGeo Labs is an umbrella for open source geospatial software projects that would like to become OSGeo projects in the future, but that aren't ready for incubation quite yet. It is appropriate to submit your new or experimental project as an OSGeo labs project.

The volunteers that work as part of OSGeo Labs have the goal of helping OSGeo Labs Projects qualify for incubation. To reach this goal, OSGeo Labs volunteers help OSGeo Labs Projects with the following tasks:

• Project marketing.
• Development of user and programmer communities.
• Establishment of programs and policies for project documentation, copyright assignment, and licensing.
• Establishment of programs and policies for software development. This includes version tracking, bug tracking, and feature request tracking, creation of a development road map, and organization of code sprints/events.
• Establishment of project governance programs and policies.
• Collaboration on technical standars, data formats, and code sharing with other open source geospatial software projects.
• Utilization of software development infrastructure like mailing lists, bug trackers, version control software/hosting, and web hosting.

OSGeo Labs Project Selection Criteria

Projects should only submit themselves for inclusion in OSGeo Labs if they follow the OSGeo Incubation principles.

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 supports geospatial applications.
4. The project hopes to become a graduated OSGeo project,.

Becoming a Labs Project

The goal is to keep the submission process for OSGeo Labs as simple and painless as possible. (The OSGeo Incubation Process is hard enough.) To submit your software project for inclusion in OSGeo Labs, simply send a description of the project to the OSGeo Incubation Committee Mailing List, or e-mail Landon Blake.

OSGeo Labs Set-Up Process

Once a project has been accepted into OSGeo Labs, the OSGeo Labs volunteers will help the projects take these steps:

1. Selection of an open source license if the project hasn't already done so.
2. Creation a home page for the project. The OSGeo wiki is recommended for this page.
3. Announce and discuss the project on the OSGeo Discuss email list.
4. Set the project software development up on the OSGeo infrastructure if appropriate. (Sourceforge or other software development hosting sites can be used as an alternative.)

Labs Project Status Conditions

We’ve designed an informal “status” system to assist programmers and users evaluate projects in OSGeo Labs. Each project in labs is assigned one (1) of five (5) status conditions. The following factors are used to determine the status condition of the projects:

1) Source Code Completeness 2) Source Code Stability 3) Community Support (Mailing Lists, Documentation, Tutorials) 4) Project Deliverables (Programming Libraries and/or Executables) 5) Project Infrastructure (Source Code Versioning, Bug Trackers, Feature Trackers, Web Site, Mailing Lists, Discussion Forums) 6) Project Governance (Decision Making Processes, Licensing, Copyright Assignment, Release Schedule, Coding Standards) 7) Community Activity 8) Marketing and Outreach

Below are the different status conditions that can be assigned to a project in Labs.

• Seed: This project is in the conceptual stage. There may be some source code written, but it is incomplete or very experiemental. The project may lack deliverables, community support, project infrastructure, project governance, community activity, or marketing and outreach.

• Seedling: This project is moving beyond the conceptual stage with some concrete code. However the code is still experimental and isn't stable. Projects at this status level could still experience a lot of change in their code base. This project should start to have some project infrastructure and some basic documentation.

• Sapling: This project has functional source code, although it may not be "mature and feature rich". For example, the code may only be usable as a programming library or a command line tool instead of featuring a GUI. The project has started to support users and programmers with communication tools, trackers, and documentation. The project has started to think about project governance and marketing, perhaps creating plans in these areas that are not fully implemented.

• Adult: This project has a usable and user friendly deliverable, like an executable program or a stable and well-deocumented programming library. The project is supporting users and programmers with communication tools, trackers, and documentation. It has started the initial phases of incubation. This includes addressing issues of copyright, licensing, and project governance. The project also has a marketing and community growth plan and has started to implement the plan.

Member Projects

• OSGeo Labs: Geoinformatica
• OSGeo Labs: pgRouting
• OSGeo Labs: PAGC
• OSGeo Labs: MapProxy
• OSGeo Labs: pycsw
• OSGeo Labs: The SurveyOS KML Toolkit
• OSGeo Labs: SlitherGrid
• OSGeo Labs: Virtual Terrain Project
• OSGeo Labs: PyWPS

Archive

There is an archive of the old OSGeo Labs page at OSGeo Labs Page Archive.