[OSGeo-Discuss] Supporting new projects

[Tamas Szekeres]

2007/9/30, Paul Spencer <pspencer at dmsolutions.ca>:
> What do others think about this?  Should OSGeo be in the business of
> helping new OSGeo projects get off the ground?

Absolutely. That could allow the identities to focus on establishing
the core funcionality much easier without having to bother with
creating the infrastructure behind that.

Furthermore I have the following additions/considerations according to
the responsibilities of the OSGeo from this aspect:

1. OSGeo might establish the possibility to accept new project plans
in a well formaized manner.
2. OSGeo should form a committe (or extend the roles of the incubation
committe or the role of the charter members) to decide whether a
project plan will possibly have a fair amount of interest regarding to
the functionality and technology it has. I personally would prefer if
a wider range of the community would be involved.
3. OSGeo should provide the necessary infrastucture for the project
initiatives so that they could proceed in approaching  a stable
project state (an estimated plan with the milestones should also be
gathered)
4. OGGeo would use some measures around whether the project is making
a good progress and the community around that is somewhat increasing.
5. The neglected projects are to be declared as obsolete by the OSGeo
(by using a voting process).
6. The project initiatives having a stable release could apply for
starting the incubation process for getting the OSGeo "officially
supported" state.

More comments:

- OSGeo should continue to "officially support" only the incubated
projects having a fairly considerable community around each and
possibly continue to be supported in the future as well.
- As the number of the projects is increasing OSGeo should start
providing a better categorization between the projects and their
functionalities/technologies for guiding the new users to make the
selection easier an find the differences between them in connection
with the desired specifications they have.
- Project duplicates should be avoided, new incremental
functionalities should be stirred towards the existing projects as
much as possible.


Best regards,

Tamas