General Principles of Incubation

Purpose of Incubation

The purpose of the OSGeo incubation process is to ensure that projects that are officially part of OSGeo:

• have a successfully operating open and collaborative development community
• have clear IP oversight of the code base of the project
• adopt the OSGeo principles and operating principles
• are mentored through the incubation process

Principles of OSGeo Projects (The OSGeo Way)

• Projects should manage themselves, striving for consensus and encouraging participation from all contributors - from beginning users to advanced developers.
• Contributors are the scarce resource and successful projects court and encourage them.
• Projects are encouraged to adopt open standards and collaborate with other OSGeo projects.
• Projects are responsible for reviewing and controlling their code bases to insure the integrity of the open source baselines.

Operating Principles

• Projects should document how they manage themselves.
• Projects should maintain developer and user documentation.
• Projects should maintain a source code management system.
• Projects should maintain a discrepancy tracking system.
• Projects should maintain project mailing lists.
• Projects should actively promote their participation in OSGeo.
• Projects are encouraged to adopt OSGeo look and feel, branding, logos on their project sites.
• Projects are encouraged to participate in OSGeo standardization efforts to present a common interface for OSGeo visitors and members.
• Projects should have automated build and smoke test systems.