[Incubator] Wake up call

[Frank Warmerdam]

Gary Sherman wrote:
>> Hi Gary,
>> I think we never met personally. If we would have you would know that 
>> I am just a harmless blond with no intention except showing off her 
>> tits. They are fearful and intimidating indeed, not me or what I say.
>>
>> But now that you mention it, I am actually missing all information 
>> about QuantumGIS in the Wiki. There is not even a Project Status page:
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Incubation_Committee#Progress
>>
>> The QuantumGIS mentor was assigned here:
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/2007-February/000605.html
>>
>> Incubation was approved here:
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Twenty_Fifth_Board_Meeting
> 
> As you say, nothing has happened since approval. Perhaps it is my fault, 
> but I'm unclear as to what happens next. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) 
> that the mentor is supposed to initiate the process.

Gary,

The mentor is there to answer questions, and will sometimes be proactive
in poking you to progress.  But I don't think of it as being primarily
their responsibility to prod you on. Arnulf has listed important first
steps (getting the status page filled out).  Beyond that important
objectives are:

1) Getting organized governance structures in place and documenting them
    if they don't already exist.  Normally this is accomplished as some sort
    of RFC type document describing your project steering committee's
    operation.

2) Do a review of your code base for possible issues.  This is sometimes
    referred to as a provenance review.

3) Make sure you have rules in place for your committers to ensure they
    understand their responsibilities with regard to keeping the provenance
    clean after the review.

4) Review others issues with the openness and professionalism of the project
    that you think should be addressed as part of incubation.  In the past
    this has included things like institutionalizing use of a bug database,
    improving user documentation, and automated build and smoketests.

5) Consider taking advantage of OSGeo infrastructure hosting for things like
    svn, downloads, trac, buildbot.  As well as lightening the load for your
    project admins, it should also ensure fairly timely resolution of
    infrastructure problems.

I hope this helps a bit.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org