OSGeo Community Projects

This is an OSGeo outreach initiative promoting "open source and participatory" geospatial technology. This outreach effort is undertaken by the OSGeo incubation committee to assist projects with open source and community development.

This initiative is currently being renamed (from OSGeo Labs) due to a conflict with GeoForAll committee use of the term.

See http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Labs

Purpose

Welcome to OSGeo Technology. The projects listed here are part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and range from new experimental projects to established pillars of our open source ecosystem.

All projects here meet our goals as an organization - they are open source (no really we checked) and are inclusive and welcoming to new contributors. Projects that go on to establish excellence in community building, documentation, and governance can enter our "incubation" program.

The volunteers that work as part of OSGeo Technology Projects have the goal of helping OSGeo Technology Project qualify for incubation. To reach this goal,OSGeo Technology Project volunteers help OSGeo Technology Project 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 standards, 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.

Comparison with Incubation

As shown below there is some overlap with the OSGeo incubation process.

Responsibility	Technology	Project
Open Source - check headers - See LICENSE.md	X	X
Participatory - See CONTRIBUTING.md	X	X
Open Community - communication channel - decision making process		X
Active Healthy Community - user and developer collaboration - long term viability		X
Development Process - version control - issue tracker - leadership open to new members - transparent decision making		X
Documentation - user documentation - developer documentation		X
Release Procedure - release process - documented testing process		X
Reward	Technology	Project
Foundation Representation	incubation chair	project officer
Foundation Resources - infrastructure and facilities - budget, fundraising, marketing	X	X

OSGeo Technology Project Selection Criteria

If your project would like to join OSGeo the technology initiative asks:

1. OSI approved open source license

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 OSGeo Technology Project

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

OSGeo Technology Project Set-Up Process

Once a project has been accepted into OSGeo Technology Project, the OSGeo Technology Project 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.)

OSGeo Technology 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 OSGeo Technology Project.

• 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 Technology Project: Geoinformatica
• OSGeo Technology Project: pgRouting
• OSGeo Technology Project: PAGC
• OSGeo Technology Project: MapProxy
• OSGeo Technology Project: pycsw
• OSGeo Technology Project: Virtual Terrain Project
• OSGeo Technology Project: PyWPS
• OSGeo Technology Project: OSGeo Certification

Archive

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