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.

Why would my project want to join?

• Encourage your project to adopt 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
    • Define 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
• 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)

---