[Incubator] Pending Incubator Applications

[Blammo]

All,

I was just sort of biding my time on this.  Waiting for the committee to 
get to this point,  I've been reading just about every post though.  So 
get ready, I'll probably ruffle some feathers.  :c)

I have some questions for the group before answering about GeoMoose.

Not all seem to hold with the exact same views as far as what is 
required for incubation.  GeoMoose is a young project (publicly) and has 
been promoted as a niche product to date, to County and local 
governments.   That's not to say that it's not useful for other things, 
just what the majority of developers and users are focused on.   It's 
grown in user base mainly based on word of mouth, little to no promotion 
other than the odd presentation here and there.  It's starting to get 
reviews form some unexpected areas however.

Anyway, one of my questions has to do with how the threshold for success 
of a certain project trait is arrived at?  How do smaller operations get 
compared to larger ones?   Is there a concrete requirement that some 
minimum number be involved, etc.   I'm not sure I understand how the 
greater community usage/developement value of a project is arrived at.

Another question has to do with what seems to me, to be a fairly hard 
edged line when dealing with the incubation process acceptance.  There 
doesn't seem to be a "Project in Training" stage, unless you count the 
actual vetting, which would in many cases be too short a time span to 
correct perceived deficiencies.

A last question deals with how general community feedback is counted, 
for example, I would have liked to rate some of the past projects myself 
that I had reviewed for my own purposes, I wasn't really meaning that my 
vote should count for anything, but just having a chance to comment on 
things from an end user perspective seems like a good vetting process 
somewhere in the stream, and could at least identify areas to focus 
attention on.

A possible method for applying some of these ideas would be to institute 
a middle level of incubation, this "Project in Training" piece, that 
announces projects to the greater community, sort of in a preliminary 
review stage, and gets through a preliminary level of acceptance.   Then 
the projects stay in this pre-incubation stage for a while, probably 
different lengths of time for different projects.  But I see this 
pre-incubation time span as a method of letting others take a look and 
see if they are interested in participating at all, or even have 
comments at all about the project.  This pre-incubation acceptance would 
have it's own level acceptance that potential users/developers could use 
as a minimum standard to trust in, and provide any feedback.  I see the 
actaull Incubation certifcation process becomeing more of a formality in 
this context in that a project wouldn't move out of pre-incubation until 
there was a close to 100% chance that it would be accepted.  This seem 
to give a whole new level of flexibility to the process in my mind.

Now to sort of answer the original GeoMoose question, I would prefer to 
start the GeoMoose process out in some manner as described above.   But 
if there is no chance of that, then we'll need to consider things from a 
different perspective.

Thanks

bobb


Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Folks,
>
> We currently have three incubator vacancies based on our self imposed 10
> project limit.  There is no need to fill them all, but I do I think it is
> time to review our outstanding applications:
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&component=Incubator&keywords=%7Eapplication&order=priority 
>
>
> GeoMOOSE
> JVNMobileGIS
> ORCHESTRA
> deegree
>
> Our project evaluation criteria are found at:
>
>   http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/evaluation.html
>
> Beyond that we need mentor volunteers from the committee before we can
> bring a project into incubation.
>
> So, I'm interested in feedback from the committee on our way forward.
> This would include:
>  o mentor volunteers for any of the projects
>  o feedback on the suitability of the above projects for incubation
>  o suggestions on what to do next (irc meeting?  bring forward a motion?)
>
> From my point of view:
>  1) I think deegree is suitable for OSGeo incubation and I'd like a 
> volunteer
>     to act as mentor.
>
>  2) I'd like someone on the committee (presumably someone knowledgable 
> about
>     Java) to do an indepth review of JVNMobileGIS to give us a sense 
> of it's
>     maturity, and suitability.
>
>  3) I think we still lack sufficient understanding of the ORCHESTRA 
> project
>     to move forward.  I'm not too sure how to get over this hump.
>
>  4) I'd like to hear if Bob would still like to proceed with GeoMOOSE
>     incubation - I think there was some uncertainty.  If so, I think 
> someone
>     on the committee should evaluate GeoMOOSE.
>
> Best regards,