[OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats

[Jody Garnett]

Specifically ways to encourage new developers to take part in existing projects - you are correct that it is a form of out reach.
You will also notice that the "code sprints" have been a very successful undertaking, indeed one of the best ways we know of to encourage collaboration.

I am sure there are other ways as a foundation we can encouraging the "development" side of the street?

I will need to think more to understand the comment about software development; my best guess is email lists like metacrs where numbers are thrown around in anger to make sure the projects actually produce the same result (or know why they are different). I am sure test data where the IP was known to be clear would also help.
-- 
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 2:44 PM, Tyler Mitchell wrote: 
> Are you thinking more like looking for ways to encourage new developers or to specifically funding new development? 
> 
> I've always had the sense that, organisationally speaking, it's harder to do specific things like that since OSGeo doesn't really get involved in the development side of the projects (outside of incubation requirements). My other sense has assumed that the projects themselves know the best ways to help enlist more programmers or find funding for more programming - but I've been wrong before!
> 
> There were one or two comments in the survey suggesting that OSGeo should NOT be so outward focused (e.g. into marketing the projects), but should be focused more on software development. I struggle to wrap my mind around this since I have always seen OSGeo's goal as primarily for outreach to get the software products into more hands. As far I can recall, no one ever said "hey, we should start an organisation to improve development and share a code repository" - since the projects had been chugging away pretty well long before the .org ever existed. Instead the idea was to collaborate on outreach, with shared web services and project-level sponsorship programs being a nice side effect. My memory might be selective here though, I am aging. ;)
> 
> I don't think that's where you were aiming though, but would love to hear more details about what you were thinking.
> Make sense? Thanks!
> 
> Tyler
> 
> 
> On 2011-05-12, at 9:30 PM, Jody Garnett wrote:
> 
> > If I can put in 2 cents for something that seems to have been missed: supporting open source development.
> > 
> > I know developers are mostly self motivating; but just like "target areas" devoted to use it would be good to see some target areas devoted to "development".
> > 
> > -- 
> > Jody Garnett
> > 
> > On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 5:30 AM, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> > 
> > > View online: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2
> > > ----
> > > 
> > > We just hit > 100 respondents on my recent survey! You can still chime in with your thoughts on the direction and priorities for OSGeo:
> > > http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey 
> > > 
> > > The first two questions were around priority "target areas", basically constituents/groups/areas that we should, collectively, spend more time working with e.g. Academic, business, government, etc. 
> > > 
> > > The first question just asked if they were good ideas and the results were all pretty much positive - but with Academic development coming out on top with the highest number of "this is important" votes. 
> > > 
> > > The second question forced voters to make a decision and rank the ideas from least to most important. Again, Academic development came out on top. I'll crunch some more stats later, but thought you might find this graph interesting. Sorry if you don't like 6 axis graphs :)
> > > 
> > > See the graph: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2
> > > 
> > > The area within the blue line represents those who voted "unimportant" for the topic and within the red line those who voted "important". These are aggregates of "least important, low importance" vs "fairly, very, most important". "Marginal importance" was ignored for this graph. Note the larger the gap between the red and blue lines on an axis shows a greater difference in voting preference. The two rings represent 50% and 100% of votes.
> > > 
> > > Even from this perspective it shows a very strong support for the academic idea, with Government in second. Then Open Standards and Open Data.
> > > 
> > > Not a perfect summary but it's got me thinking and thought you might find it interesting too. More to come when I get a chance to dig through the numbers. 
> > > 
> > > Thanks to all who voted!_______________________________________________
> > > Discuss mailing list
> > > Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> > > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> > 
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