[Geomoose-users] GeoMoose organization

Fri Feb 25 11:55:46 EST 2011

Christopher,
As one of the people that has been involved with GeoMOOSE since its inception as an OS project, things have evolved greatly over the past 4-5 years as Bob pointed out.  In the past 1-2 years we have seen GeoMOOSE evolve with different organizations and I feel we are really at the point now where we need to make the next leap in making the GeoMOOSE project have more formal guidance documents to help move ideas through the process and a way to come to consensus on them.  We have talked about doing this a year ago but nothing has really happened on that front.  We did form a loose "Project Steering Committee" but really don't use it for votes or any formal process yet.

Over the past year a lot of the new enhancements you are seeing have been funded by the Oregon group or other Houston Engineering clients and we struggle with how to appropriately get those back into the core code  by following some type of process.  Most of the contribute code has been through Houston Engineering or Dan Little.  In my opinion we need a couple of governance documents to help people and organizations understand the process to contribute.  I think one big improvement that has happened is the new wiki that allows the community to contribute easier.  I started to organize this around the thought of getting to more of a formal process in place.  http://www.geomoose.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page  I think there are some good examples of this process already in place with the MapServer (http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1.html) and OpenLayers (http://trac.osgeo.org/openlayers/wiki/HowToContribute) projects.  Here's my high level thoughts on the process we need to put into place:

1)      Someone proposes an idea through a "Request for Comments" (RFC)

2)      The community comments on the ideas for the proposer.

3)      The proposer develops the idea into a real application/widget/thing the community and PSC can see.

4)      The PSC then votes whether this should go into the core code or not.  Does it follow coding guidelines, what ramifications does it have, etc...

5)      The code is committed if it accepted or it becomes a contributed user extension or a code snippet

I agree with Dean that I think a user meeting at FOSS4G would be ideal, but we also need a moderator to help us come to some consensus on where the GeoMOOSE project goes.  I will be at FOSS4G as well.

Finally I would welcome the Maine group in joining the GeoMOOSE project and please let us know if you have any further questions or if we can do anything to help.  It always fun to see the project grow!

Regards,
Brian

Brian Fischer, CFM  GIS Manager
Houston Engineering, Inc.
Phone: Direct: 763-493-6664 / W: 763.493.4522 / M: 763.229.2734

From: DEAN ANDERSON [mailto:ANDERSON.DEAN at co.polk.or.us]
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 10:23 AM
To: Bob.Basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us; geomoose-users at lists.sourceforge.net; Christopher.Kroot at maine.gov
Subject: Re: [Geomoose-users] GeoMoose organization

Bob

It appears you are going to be at FOSSG,  perhaps that would be a good place to talk about this some evening.  The Oregon Consortium would like to help in this process along and we do have a limited amount of funds to contribute. We  identified some of the same issues as a priority for us at our last Oregon consortium meeting.  If folks would like to do this sooner perhaps we could arrange something.    Perhaps we could do a  project this summer and then review the results as a group this September. Our project lists are documented on the Wiki in the community pages section.

We have made great progress to date in Oregon with GeoMoose to date and would like to see the program continue to mature.

Dean Anderson
IT Director
Polk County

>>> "Bob Basques" 02/25/11 8:04 AM >>>

Christopher,

There are a few commercial and non-profit vendors available now that have done quite a bit of work in the setup, development and research related to GeoMoose and it's continued development, and this type of support has progressed the project very nicely to date.  Having said that I'm also aware of the need to setup some dedicated support functions along the lines of bug fixes, continued development and research into additional capabilities as well as integration with other Opensource as well as proprietary GIS services and systems.  These GeoMoose savvy groups also have some additional ideas and capabilities already in the hopper related to improvements.   They are also very interested in hearing from people and groups such as yourself with respect to desired capabilities of the package.   I would be interested in your specification (or capabilities) wish list for example, regardless, purely for planning purposes.

My thoughts in recent months have been in setting up some sort of shepherding arrangement with the core developer group, that can handle a supporting roll in the GeoMoose development process.   Such entities already exist, either as commercial and/or non-profits, and are interested in this type of work arrangement.  To date there hasn't been a single large enough project or group of smaller projects with similar enough interests to successfully sponsor the type of support structure you are describing.

I'm prepared to attempt the arrangement of such a framework with the core development group once a seeding sponsor or sponsors (such as yourself) have been identified as being interested in pursuing such an arrangement.

Please pass on your desired needs list and if you are interested in discussing further, we can keep this thread going or go offline as well.

Thanks

bobb

Bob Basques

GIS Systems Developer

City of Saint Paul, MN.

612.598.9210

http://gis.ci.stpaul.mn.us

>>> "Kroot, Christopher" <Christopher.Kroot at maine.gov<mailto:Christopher.Kroot at maine.gov>> wrote:

Hello all

My name is Christopher Kroot and I am the enterprise GIS analyst for the State of Maine Office of GIS. We are currently using mapserver to create WMS for imagery.  We have developed a simple front end application built with java script and php with mapserver as the backend.  We have determine that others have progressed much further down this road then we have and are looking at selecting a code base for our current and future development.

We are considering using GeoMoose as the code base for our enterprise web mapping applications that have a mapserver backend.  Currently we have 5 stakeholder groups who have provided us with the functionally requirements for their web mapping needs.  My review of the Clatsop County Web Maps http://maps.co.clatsop.or.us/applications/index.html#<http://maps.co.clatsop.or.us/applications/index.html>  is promising, as it contains most of the base functionality required.  We will be investing a significant amount of resource in the coming years into the environment we choose and want to select the best one to start with.

What is the organizational structure for GeoMoose?  Are their funded positions for maintenance and future development?

We are using the ESRI ArcServer environment for web mapping that requires complex spatial analysis, geoprocessing, other more complex functional requirements.

Thank you for your assistance and have a good day

Christopher Kroot
Enterprise GIS Analyst
Maine Office of GIS
SHS 174
264 Civic Center Drive
Augusta ME 04333-0174
christopher.kroot at maine.gov<mailto:christopher.kroot at maine.gov>
207-592-0162

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