[OSGeo-Discuss] Supporting new projects

[Gérald Fenoy]

Paul Spencer <pspencer at dmsolutions.ca>:

 > I'd like to open a discussion on how OSGeo is (or is not) supporting
 > brand new projects.
 >
 > While at the FOSS4G 2007 conference (awesome job Paul R. and gang), a
 > number of new people (new to the conference and/or to me) approached
 > me to demonstrate their particular projects and ask how to make them
 > Open Source.  This got me thinking about OSGeo's role in fostering
 > innovation and giving new projects a chance to get off the ground.
 >
 > Our current incubation process favours established projects, ones
 > that have an established code base, established community, etc.  It
 > does not, and arguably should not, be a place to start new projects.
 >
 > For folks already established in OS and OSGeo, we have established
 > communities around ourselves that can be used to attract people to
 > new projects that we are spawning - Fusion, for instance.  For
 > others, though, there is no such place to launch a new project and to
 > try to build the community of users and developers required to build
 > a project.  They have no clue where to start.  And I don't feel that
 > comfortable telling someone their project is a good idea or not - my
 > view of the world is usually quite limited to the things I'm
 > interested in and I have no clue if the rest of the community would
 > be interested or not.
 >
 > The FOSS4G conference can be a good place to publicize new projects,
 > but I would argue that it is not generally convenient to get to for
 > most people in the world and perhaps more difficult for new projects
 > to get on the agenda if the presenters are relatively unknown.
 >
 > It seems to me that there could be a role for OSGeo in providing a
 > breeding ground for new projects by providing advice on how to create
 > a brand new open source geospatial project, including a home, a
 > presence, and some initial marketing to the existing OSGeo  
communities.
 >
 > What do others think about this?  Should OSGeo be in the business of
 > helping new OSGeo projects get off the ground?

Hi,
IMHO this is really a good idea. Indeed, right now new projects have  
to create
their own infrastructures to manage their projects (using a trac  
system or
something similar) but it could be a better solution to purpose an  
allready
existing (ready-to-use, up-to-date, secure and so on) infrastructure to
store/start new projects. Even if it's not really a big work to make  
this kind
of infrastructure running, it could be easier to use an allready  
ready-to-use
platform for deploying the source code and make some documentation  
for a new
project.

This way, some projects should be able to start quicker, as they  
don't have to
manage their own infrastructure. Furthermore, all new projects could  
get a
"standard" and central way to start and present their own work (new  
projects)
without bothering with presentation (for example) or something like  
that which
could be really frustrating if they only want to share their source  
code and
create some documentation on how to use and also defining the  
functionalities
of their project(s).

So IMHO in some sense OSGeo should became something like sourceforge  
but only
for gis-oriented free software. But maybe I'm wrong so correct me if  
it's the
case.

Furthermore, OSGeo should became the starting point to search for gis- 
oriented
free software, this sounds good to me.

Hope to hear more about this topic soon.


Regards,


Gérald Fenoy
Official mail : gerald [_ dot _] fenoy [_ at _] geolabs [_ dot _] fr
Open source mail : djay [_ at _] gentoo [_ dot _] org,
sci-geosciences herd listen on sci-geosciences [_ at _] gentoo [_ dot  
_] org