Community Mapbuilder Incubation Progress

This page is based upon the OSGeo Project Status Template

Basics

Has the project been approved for incubation by the OSGeo board?

Yes.

Has an OSGeo committee member been assigned as Mentor?

Steve Lime has been designated incubation mentor for Community MapBuilder.

Infrastructure Transition

Note, for each of the following it isn't necessary to move to foundation infrastructure, but if you aren't a reason should be provided.

Has the projectname.osgeo.org domain been populated with the projects web presence?

If not why, and has the project page got a prominent link to the real home?

http://communitymapbuilder.osgeo.org has been set up and points to http://communitymapbuilder.org.

Comments from Cameron Shorter: Currently I'm reluctant to move our services to Collabnet. Here are the reasons:

1. While Collabnet is currently very supportive of OSGeo which is excellent to see, the reallity of the commercial world is that in five years there might be a change of management at Collabnet and the OSGeo support might be cut off. So before we enter in with Collabnet, we need to think about an exit strategy if we loose Collabnet support. As I understand it, the current exit strategy would involve migrating from proprietary tools to "free for open source" tools which would be expensive in effort.
2. Migrating to Colabnet would involve a medium amount of effort and we would loose some information like bugs from the bug tracker.

I would prefer to keep all project tools on one server rather than many. Currently codehaus.org is providing most of our tools. They provide tools for free, and the tools used are available for free to open source projects so we have a low cost exit stratagy if Codehaus folds.

Is the OSGeo bug tracker being used for the project?

No, we use JIRA at http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAP See justification above. Moving to OSGeo will require medium effort and we will loose an amount of data.

Is the OSGeo mailing list manager being used for the project?

No. Lists are stored on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=35246 which has a slightly better interface - (Web subscribe interface, threads in the archieve). We could move our lists in future if archieves can be moved as well. But as yet, I don't see a need to move to an inferior tool.

Is the OSGeo SVN or CVS system being used for the project?

No. We use SVN on http://codehaus.org It would be relatively easy to use SVN at OSGeo but we like to keep our tools all on the one server. Codehaus also provides Fisheye, a nice tool for viewing the subversion repository.

Are binary and source downloads available from the OSGeo download area?

We currently use Sourceforge to download releases, however we are in the process of setting up a nightly build and download on an OSGeo server. This would be relatively easy to move to OSGeo.

Community Functioning

Is there a functioning user support mechanisms (ie. mailing list)?

Yes, we have a busy list with lots of answers to user queries.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=mapbuilder-devel

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=mapbuilder-users

Are source and binary downloads for the package available?

Yes. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=35246

Has a Project Steering Committee been formed, and given control of the project?

Yes. Project Steering Committee has been in effect since the start of the project. It currently consists of:

• Cameron Shorter
• Mike Adair
• Patrice Cappelaere
• Steven Ottens

Does the Project Steering Committee have documentation on project procedures for PSC decisions, contributor guidelines, etc.

Yes.

http://communitymapbuilder.org/display/MAP/Contributers+Guide describes project roles and responsibilities.

http://communitymapbuilder.org/display/MAP/Decision+Making describes decision making.

How many active developers are there? Are they from multiple organizations?

4 Core developers (the PSC) and around 10 to 15 other developers.

All the PSC work for different organisations and live in different countries. Similarly, the developers and users all come from different organisations and geographic locations.

Foundation Membership

Have project documents been updated to reflect membership in the foundation, and the relationship of the project to the foundation?

Yes

Has an effort been made to brand the project web site with OSGeo foundation web styling and branding marks?

Not yet. We will wait for an OSGeo web style to be established before using this style. The following issue has been raised to track this: [1].

Code Copyright Review

Has a Code Provenance Review document been prepared for the project?

Yes. Results are in the Mapbuilder repository at mapbuilder/docs/licenseAudit/* and copied to Community Mapbuilder Provenance Review.

Have issues raised in the provenance review been adequately addressed?

Yes, most issues related to the code providence review. We were unsure of the origin of some of our code. There were also a few tweaks required for the documentation.