General Principles of Incubation

This document is meant to be a guide to the incubation principles of OSGeo.

• Projects should manage themselves striving for consensus and encouraging participation from all contributors - from beginning users to advanced developers.
• Projects should document how they manage themselves.
• 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 should maintain developer and user documentation.
• Projects should maintain a source code management system - svn is preferred.
• Projects should maintain a discrepancy tracking system.
• Projects should maintain project mailing lists.
• Projects should actively promote their participation in OSGeo.
• Projects are responsible for reviewing and controlling their code bases to insure the integrity of the open source baselines.
• 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

The OSGeo will in turn attempt to make available the best of breed open source collaborative tools and resources to support those efforts, if we offer better tools and resources projects will naturally migrate to the better implementations.

I'm sure I've missed several important points, the main point being that we lead vs control.

New projects compete for our approval with the same guidelines - hopefully they will be included based on their perceived value to the OSGeo overall goals and objectives.

Mark Lucas' thoughts on incubation