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:

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

Principles of OSGeo Projects (The OSGeo Way)

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

Operating Principles

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