Talk:OSGeo Community Projects

Some Ideas on what to do with OSGeo Labs to better utilize it for recruitment of projects, contributors and community.

Idea 1

This is just one grouping of ideas, please feel free to comment and add alternate ideas.

What is OSGeo Labs? A place to encourage the growth and sustainability of open source geospatial applications.

(Short Version) How this is different from the current: we're thinking of an launchpage to a list of Labs projects, projects fill out a form (like the questionarre below) to get listed, the catalog of these is then searchable/sortable, Labs becomes the minimum bar for any group requesting things like mailing list from SAC and help set marketing priorities for things like the Live DVD and it also becomes a way to recruit good project, demonstrate affinity with OSGeo and show OSGeo's role in fostering the future

(Full Version) Why would my project want to join?

• Encourage your project to adopt sustainable development practices(Adverstise that your project aims to achieve sustainable development practices.)
  • To help find additional developers
  • To expand the user community
  • Create a dialog between the users and developers
  • Form some type of Project Steering Committee
    • A place to work on defining the workflow for patches, translations, documentation
  • Get help picking the right license for your project
  • Get help coming up with a long term road map
• Access to OSGeo infrastructure and marketing (varied by project and availability)
• Figure out if applying to be an OSGeo project is right for your project (Applying for incubation)
• Demonstrate your projects willingness to be part of an open, collaborative community
• Show you affiliation with OSGeo and it's projects
• Increase your visibility among the Open Source Geospatial Community
• Potential Cross project collaboration

What type of projects should join?

• Anything related to open geospatial topics (Need not be a software project directly)
• That can be licensed under an OSI approved open source license
• Does not contain any patents subject to license restrictions
• Have a willingness to explore expanding the current community and increase participation.

Why might OSGeo labs be a better place for my project instead of OSGeo Project Incubation?

• Projects related to Open Data Access (OpenAerialMap), Open Education(Free GIS Book), OSGeo Live DVD|Virtual Machine etc.
• Maybe you don't meet all the requirements to be an OSGeo project, yet
• Not sure how to take your project fully open source/community based yet but still want to encourage patches/participation from the community
• Aren't quite ready to decide the future direction of the project
• Haven't worked out licensing and patents yet
• Project is still in the planning stages with little or no working code

What does OSGeo offer Lab's projects? (These are all opt in services)

• mailing lists
• source code hosting (depends on resource availability)
• wiki space
• marketing exposure
  • Inclusion on the OSGeo Live project
  • Awareness at conference booths
  • Web Presence at OSGeo a meeting place of open source geospatial
• A path towards project incubation – If you're thinking about applying for incubation take a step towards that goal by joining OSGeo labs.
• Even if your project falls by the wayside from lack of interest, OSGeo can assure an archive of the code in case others will find it useful sometimein the future.
• an OSGeo labs logo you can put on your website and marketing materials
• Participation in Google Summer of Code under OSGeo

What do I have to do to join?

• List your project on the OSGeo Labs project page
  • Include contact information
  • Links to current code
  • Licensing status
• Occasionally OSGeo will go through and verify compliance with the basic rules of OSGeo Labs and notify your project if you're out of compliance (and then remove if it's not fixable or you won't fix it)

New Project Questionnaire/Checklist: (This could also just be a reworked version of the Incubation Application) This serves multiple purposes: Introduces the project to prospective participants and users, helps you asses the state of your project and compare against full Project and Projects in Incubation

  1. Whats the name?
  2. What does it do?
        1. Programming Languages
        2. Desktop, Web, Database, Library, etc?
        3. What makes it different from other similar stuff?
        4. Do you have a roadmap? URL?
  3. Community
        1. How many people have commit access
        2. How many people other than committers submit patches, documentation, webpages, on a regular basis?
        3. If you have mailing list(s), how many unique subscribers, how many email/week?
  4. Contact/Governance
        1. If you have a website, URL?
        2. Who owns the Copyrights? Patents?
        3. Do you have a governance model (Steering Committee, etc)?
        4. Who is the main contact(s) for the project?
  5. Other
        1. Are you looking for more ideas to get started?
        2. Do you want more coders?
        3. Need help with anything in particular pertaining to Governance, Licensing, etc.?

A note on a gentle way to push projects to join: Or call it a Rewards system: Google Summer of Code - OSGeo Project, Incubation, Labs will always be ranked higher than non registered applications (ie MapWindow) OSGeo Live - We're reaching disc capacity so will have to start turning down applications and prioritizing; OSGeo Project, Incubation, Labs take priority over all other applications no matter how good the other stuff is (ie mapnik, kosmo, spatialite, geopublisher <- we should be inviting all of these) Website should be labs.osgeo.org or osgeo.org/labs with main page possibly having a status update showing recent activity in labs or a way to find stuff in labs.

This should push projects that really ought to be part of OSGeo in some way to start down the path, without us having to be very harsh, considering how easy it is to join.

Projects to invite/encourage:

   * mapnik
   * kosmo
   * openjump
   * geopublisher
   * marble
   * osgearth
   * Mapwindow
   * ILWIS
   * SAGA
   * Opticks
   * liblas (propose merge with GDAL/OGR?)
   * Various R Spatial View packages
   * GeoJQuery (Maybe it can merge with GeoExt to be GeoJS with multiple downloads for Ext only/Jquery only, Both - you know some will do both)
   * GeoKettle
   * OpenCPN
   * Octave Mapping Toolbox
   * MapTiler
   * A bunch of things that applied for incubation that clearly are not ready for incubation. (In my mind there needs to be clear community interest and involvement in a project to consider it)

I'm well aware there are more floating around that people have mentioned recently.

Benefits to OSGeo:

• Demonstrate our role in the Open Source Geospatial Community
• Have projects acknowledge their affiliation (Plenty of projects come to FOSS4G and have people on our lists but don't necessarily link to us on their pages or tell people about us in local context)
• Give us a way to encourage merging, collaboration, new project initiation.
• Provide a map to applying for Incubation.
• By instilling good community principles it helps to highlight what makes OSGeo stuff different from a random OSS project on the internet.
• More projects in the Labs is a bigger pool of people for FOSS4G, local chapters, etc.

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