[geos-devel] GEOS -> New Home / New Leadership

[Paul Ramsey]

All,

At FOSS4G, I had a long discussion with folks from Safe, Ingres, and 
Autodesk about the future of GEOS. The bottom line is that they are all 
interested in investing more in extending and moving GEOS forwards.

In order to make those investments more effective and future-proof and 
give the companies a voice in the project going forward, I am proposing 
a number of measures:

(a) At a technical level, having a Trac infrastructure for bugs and wiki 
notes and code browsing would be nice. I can set that up myself, but 
OSGeo already has that infrastructure. So I propose migrating the code 
to the OSGeo infrastructure, if possible.
(b) At a steering level, taking the Project Steering Committee (PSC) 
role out of the explicit control of a single maintainer (historically 
funded by Refractions) and into a full PSC.
(c) A and B above are in aid of an eventual move into OSGeo Incubation 
and full OSGeo project membership. We know these will have to be done to 
enter OSGeo, so might as well start now.

I would like to get the PSC boot-strapped with representatives from the 
existing user/developer base of GEOS.

May I propose:

- Martin Davis, Refractions, who has an understanding of the architecture
- Representatives of Autodesk and Safe, who already have "skin in the 
game" and are gearing up for more development
- Howard Butler, who can navigate our passage into the OSGeo 
infrastructure world, and provide a viewpoint from build maintenance and 
script bindings

This PSC can serve for six months, adding whomever it sees fit, and then 
be re-formed based on the conditions in March 2008.

Thoughts?

Paul


-- 

   Paul Ramsey
   Refractions Research
   http://www.refractions.net
   pramsey at refractions.net
   Phone: 250-383-3022
   Cell: 250-885-0632