[OSGeo-Discuss] Supporting new projects

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2007 at 05:10:22PM -0400, Paul Spencer wrote:
> What do others think about this?  Should OSGeo be in the business of  
> helping new OSGeo projects get off the ground?

I do not think that OSGeo should be in the business of setting up
infrastructure and resources for all open source projects that are out
there. Our incubation process, as it is, is relatively lengthy and
resource consuming -- without a significant influx of new OSGeo
incubation mentors, I don't see how OSGeo can offer more than it already
does.

As a volunteer run organization, I see OSGeo as already being at the
stretching point (though not the breaking point). Many incubation
mentors also participate on other committees, or are trying to maintain
multiple things at once for OSGeo. Adding more burden onto that at this
time seems to be a mistake.

Creating more resources for projects on how to get started with an Open
Source Geospatial project sounds great. In fact, so does providing
infrastructure to projects which seem likely to be widely used in a
givene space. For example, it's clear that a well-maintained proj4js
library could be used by a number of projects -- but it hasn't shown a
strong enough community so far that I would feel comfortable having
OSGeo provide much in the way of resources for it, especially as part of
the incubation process. (3-4 users does not a community make.)

I said in a presentation last week: "A developer's time is a limited
resource. Don't waste it." I think the same applies to OSGeo resources:
until we have some number of resources which is larger than what we have
today, I think that we need to hold off on promising anything more to
projects, especially projects which are not clearly in a position to
succeed yet.

I look forward to the day when OSGeo can take promising projects and
provide them a route from start to finish, creating what is likely a
more successful project due to OSGeo's integration into the process.
However, I feel like we're stretched pretty thin at this time, so until
the day where we have people in hordes waiting for things to do, I don't
think we're at a point where I feel it's the best action for the
foundation.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer