[Incubator] OSSIM Incubation Status

[Jody Garnett]

Hi Mark:

Thanks for the background.

I am comfortable with this - meeting for lunch is a fine way to run a 
PSC. For the incubation requirements I mostly want to to ensure that it 
is public that this is where decisions are made; and that others can 
invite themselves along for lunch if they want.

Or intent is to be up front with how OSSIM is managed; and to ensure the 
community has some idea how they would integrate a new PSC member 
(preferably documented). The decisions you arrive at may not be optimal 
from a distributed project standpoint; we just want to be sure you 
arrive at them.

The GeoNetwork project made a lot of its decisions at a yearly 
face-to-face meeting. They have since set up a PSC - but I believe that 
the face to face meeting still forms part of their culture.

Jody

Mark Lucas wrote:
> It is probably a fair criticism that the majority of PSC discussions 
> occur face to face versus on the mailing list.  OSSIM is probably 
> somewhat unique in that the primary contributors all make their living 
> developing OSSIM for professional services.  Over the history of the 
> baseline the core developers have worked for different organizations 
> and companies, but have always operated as a virtual team.  Three of 
> the four PSC contributors work in the same room every day.  Dave 
> Burken works in another location and we attempt to meet for lunch at 
> least once a month.  Typically the discussion is on OSSIM and on 
> improvements that we'd like to make.  Most of the work that occurs on 
> the baseline is driven by funded requirements and we do our best to 
> summarize features that we plan to add and changes we intend to make.  
> Garrett and Dave do a pretty good job of announcing on the list what 
> they are thinking and what they intend to work on.  In most cases 
> there is little comment on their posts.
>
> We actively encourage contributions and periodically get fixes and 
> enhancements from around the world.  When the level of contribution 
> and activity rises we try to quickly establish a module that the 
> contributor can work in.  Problems and fixes are reviewed fairly 
> rapidly and merged into the system.
>
> Can we do a better job at communicating on the mailing list - 
> certainly.  We make a concerted effort to communicate our plans and 
> thoughts and quickly respond to questions, comments, and suggestions 
> on the mailing list.  If you review the mailing lists archives you 
> will find numerous examples where architectural or interface changes 
> were announced by Garrett as areas that he intends to begin work on in 
> an effort to seek out comments.
>
> We will continue to make a concerted effort to push more of this 
> discussion on to the mailing list.  We certainly are very open to 
> questions, comments, and discussion on the list.  I can't remember an 
> instance where we didn't respond in a timely manner or rejected any 
> reasonable suggestion or comment.  Our intent is to be very 
> transparent in everything that we are doing.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
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