OSGeo Community Projects

Purpose

OSGeo Labs is an umbrella for open source geospatial software projects that would like to become OSGeo projects in the future, but that aren't ready for incubation quite yet. It is appropriate to submit your new or experimental project as an OSGeo labs project.

The volunteers that work as part of OSGeo Labs have the goal of helping OSGeo Labs Projects qualify for incubation. To reach this goal, OSGeo Labs volunteers help OSGeo Labs Projects with the following tasks:

• 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 standars, 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.

OSGeo Labs Project Selection Criteria

Projects should only submit themselves for inclusion in OSGeo Labs if they follow the OSGeo Incubation principles.

1. The code is under an OSI approved license (data & doc projects need to specify their choice for a type of license).
2. The project is willing to keep code clear of encumbrances
3. The project is "geospatial", or directly supports geospatial applications.
4. The project hopes to become a graduated OSGeo project,.

Becoming a Labs Project

The goal is to keep the submission process for OSGeo Labs as simple and painless as possible. (The OSGeo Incubation Process is hard enough.) To submit your software project for inclusion in OSGeo Labs, simply send a description of the project to the OSGeo Incubation Committee Mailing List, or e-mail Landon Blake.

OSGeo Labs Set-Up Process

Once a project has been accepted into OSGeo Labs, the OSGeo Labs volunteers will help the projects take these steps:

1. Selection of an open source license if the project hasn't already done so.
2. Creation a home page for the project. The OSGeo wiki is recommended for this page.
3. Announce and discuss the project on the OSGeo Discuss email list.
4. Set the project software development up on the OSGeo infrastructure if appropriate. (Sourceforge or other software development hosting sites can be used as an alternative.)

Archive

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