[OSGeo-Discuss] New incubation procedure

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 2/16/2015 6:44 AM, Jachym Cepicky wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to dig a bit more into the topic "more fine incubation"
> procedure and former "OSGeo Labs" (now it has no name is slowly
> forgotten in past, but you can find more at
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Labs)
>
> I would like to start talk about it a bit (I suggest incubator mailing
> list), prepared wiki page (with confusing name):
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/5-star-rating
>
> Scope: to re-new OSGeo Labs, make the incubation process easier for all
> of us, with more little steps (except for one big). Projects could flow
> between the steps "up" and "down", related to their current living phase.
>
> I hope, this would help to the community to get oriented, would allow
> more projects to join in. Work for incubation committee and mentors
> could be even less (some projects will remain in beta). It's also
> related to the "certification" topic (even not people, but software).
>
> Jachym

This makes a lot of sense to me. I am involved with a lot of smaller 
projects that are valuable but unlikely to be able to stand on their own 
because the community is weak.

pagc (geocoding) - this is all but dead as a project but out of it came 
a core piece of technology the has been moved into postGIS Geocoder

pgRouting - driving directions and vehicle routing problems, we have 
contributed 8+ GSoC mentors to OSGeo over the past years, but it has 
been hard to get funding and volunteers to support ongoing development 
and project releases. We have looked at incubation, but we do not have a 
strong enough community to be able to graduate.

It would be good to have a way to foster projects like this and to look 
for opportunities to merge smaller projects into larger ones that where 
their might be a good fit. I think that we need to better recognize that 
there will be projects that might not be able to stand on their own but 
that they may also be fertile ground for development of good technology 
and that mentoring and redirecting these projects could be a good way to 
harvest this.

Anyway, something to think about ...

Best,
   -Steve