[Geomoose-users] GeoMoose organization

Fri Feb 25 14:28:22 EST 2011

Hello

Thank you all for your quick response and the useful information.  I
will compile the requirements of our 5 stakeholder groups into one
document and get that out to you the first of next week.

Have a great weekend.

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

________________________________

From: Brian Fischer [mailto:bfischer at houstoneng.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 11:56 AM
To: DEAN ANDERSON; Bob.Basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us;
geomoose-users at lists.sourceforge.net; Kroot, Christopher
Subject: RE: [Geomoose-users] GeoMoose organization

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> 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
207-592-0162 

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