OSGeo Community Projects

About OSGeo Community Projects

OSGeo Community Projects are software projects that:

Have an open source license.
Welcome new contributors.
Are in the process of building their developer and user communities.
Are in the process of working on project governance, documentation, and marketing.

OSGeo Community Projects may not yet have an active developer and user community. They may be benevolent dictatorships or feature experimental and unstable technology.

How OSGeo Community Projects Are Related To OSGeo Incubation

There are two ways for an open source software project to join OSGeo. The first way is through the regular incubation process. This is best for projects that already have an established community of developers and users. (This community should be diverse. This means that developers should come from more than one organization or group.)

If a project doesn't yet have an active and diverse community, it can join OSGeo as an OSGeo Community Project. OSGeo Community Projects get help from the incubation committee with things like choosing an open source license, setting up project governance, promoting the project, and building the project community).

The same volunteers that help software projects through the OSGeo Incubation Process also help OSGeo Community Projects.

Purpose

The purpose of OSGeo Community Projects is to provide a home at OSGeo for projects that don't qualify for our normal incubation process. This allows them to get help from the volunteers on the OSGeo Incubation Committee and to become familiar with the guidelines and operation of OSGeo as an organization. Most OSGeo Community Projects are working to qualify for the normal incubation process, but this isn't a requirement.

The normal OSGeo incubation process requires that software projects meet a high standard for things like project governance. Working through the normal incubation process can involve a lot of work. in contrast, we want the process to become and OSGeo Community Project to be as painless as possible. That allows projects to build community strength before they enter incubation.

Qualifying As An OSGeo Community Project

We would like to make joining OSGeo as an OSGeo Community Project as simple and painless as possible. If you would like your software project to become an OSGeo Community Project, please send a description of your project to the OSGeo Incubation Committee Mailing List, or e-mail Landon Blake.

Your software project needs to meet the following criteria to be a OSGeo Community Project:

The technology in your software project should be geospatial (or directly support geospatial applications).
Your project should be open source and welcomes new contributions. If you don't have a license selected, we can help with that.

Comparison with Incubation

As shown below there is some overlap requirements for an OSGeo projects (as defined by the incubation process graduation checklist).

Responsibility	OSGeo Community	OSGeo Project
Geospatial	X	X
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
Foundation Resources	Technology	Project
Representation	incubation chair	project officer
infrastructure and facilities	X	X
promotion & marketing	X	X
budget	+	X
fundraising	X	X

+ budget is available via incubation committee

Available branding:

Community	Project

Getting Started

Once your software project has been accepted as an OSGeo Community Project, the Incubation Committee will assign you personal mentor. This mentor will help your project withcommunity building and other tasks. First steps for an OSGeo Community Project include:

Creation a home page for the project. The OSGeo wiki is recommended for this page.
Selection of an open source license (if the project hasn't already done this).
Announcement and discussion of the project on the OSGeo Discuss OSGeo Discussion mailing list.
Set-up of project infrastructure (mailing list, source code repository, doc repository).
Creation of plans for software development, marketing and documentation.

Community Projects

The following projects are listed with the community projects:

Member Project History

The following projects have now graduated from incubation:

pycsw

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

Volunteers Needed

Please let us know on the Incubation Committee Mailing List if you would like to help with OSGeo Community Projects. Here is the type of help we need:

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.