Short Term Focus

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I believe the point of Gary's prioritization process was to identify
a very short list of things we should be concentrating on to build some
sense of concrete progress.

My personal opinion is that we ought to be focused in two areas:

  1) Getting a sponsorship program in place
      -> getting sponsors (shows corporate support for foundation)
      -> turning some of that sponsorship money into work accomplished

  2) Getting our initial projects through incubation with vetted "safe"
     source code, and some degree of foundation branding.

 From my point of view, public geodata, binary builds, educational hookups
and other activities should proceed but to some extent need to generate
their own energy for now.  I think VisCom is important, but mostly because
it is a step to sponsorship and exploiting the successes we have on the
above two paths.

For GDAL I have someone identified I would like to bring on board as a
maintainer for a six month contract once I have sufficient sponsorship.
I am eager to get to the point I can do that partly because of the
progress it will bring to GDAL and partly because of the sense it will
bring that the foundation has accomplished something to benefit the
sponsors who depend on GDAL.  I am hopeful that something similar can be
done for MapServer.

I could of course, go ahead and hire the person out of my existing GDAL
sponsorship monies, but I am trying to hold out and make this part of a
foundation process.  While I admit that collecting project funds and
having project PSCs dispense them has been somewhat controversial, for
me it is one of the concrete things the foundation can accomplish.

I'll "see" you all in 45 minutes.

Best regards,
-- 
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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 OSGF, http://osgeo.org