[Board] Periodic revisiting of project incubation

[Cameron Shorter]

On 10/08/12 02:11, Daniel Morissette wrote:
>> Having said that I do think that we do a pretty good job at being
>> impartial, I just want to make sure that we don't forget that as we
>> grow. We currently have 24 projects listed on osgeo.org, each with their
>> own way of doing things and we do not enforce any kind of feedback on
>> which we could establish some kind of control. I believe that we must
>> implement something here.
>>
>
> That has come up a few times in the past. Someone even at some point 
> suggested turning the Incubation Committee into the Projects Committee 
> and extend its mandate to followup wiht the projects every year or so. 
> Unfortunately the committee is already having a hard time staying on 
> top of incubator stuff, so it would not get any better of its mandate 
> was extended.

I know I have questioned the long term effectiveness of an incubation 
committee if it doesn't have periodic follow up.

For me, I see the business value of incubation in that it demonstrates a 
level of quality to the market. The comment about "how to we resource a 
periodic incubation refresh or QA refresh" is very valid. I don't have 
an easy magic answer for this, but do have some ideas on where to start:

1. The OSGeoLive project has a light weight QA process built into it, 
and a business driver which makes it attractive for projects to 
participate. QA process is "Verify your application installs and runs on 
our Ubuntu based DVD, and your docs are up to date". Business value is 
"If you do your QA process, you will get access to a valuable marketing 
pipeline". This OSGeoLive process could start to align with the 
incubation process to address a periodic review of project incubation 
status.

2. There is been discussions over the last year with the Eclipse 
Foundation and LocationTech, who I understand have developed a business 
model based around external big companies sponsoring Open Source 
projects, and including a periodic quality controlled release. I think 
there is value in investigating this relationship with 
LocationTech/Eclipse further, or alternatively investigating this 
business model.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
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