[Incubator] longer term approaches to an OSGeo Stack - [was: MapFish Incubation application - reactivation] [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

My take is that:

1) We have already decided we are not going to pick one "winner" for each
    part of the stack and exclude others.  This was implicit in MapGuide
    and MapServer being founding projects of the foundation.  So we are
    clearly going to be open to multiple projects that fill roughly the
    same role.

2) For our OSGeo marketing message to be effective I think we need to try
    and restrict ourselves to quality, good-value projects.  Pushing a weak
    project to some extent will devalue the others.  I have mostly chosen
    to interprete quality in terms of a healthy supporting community
    and projects that are reasonably mature.

3) In the past we have not tried hard to integrate things into a
    consistent stack, but we have shown some bias towards projects
    that leverage other OSGeo projects (and to encourage this), and
    also we have shown more interest in projects that "fill a gap".

I am interested in things we can do as a community to enable greater
cooperation and coordination between projects to build sharing leverage
and to ensure that things fit together more smoothly.  I think we need
to find supportive helpful ways of doing this rather than trying to
strong arm projects.

Ideas might include OSGeo providing support (eg. financial) for
meetings on topics like sharing icons and symbols or sprints involving
folks from related projects.  I don't see this as particularly a task of
the incubation committee though this is a good crowd to kick around ideas.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent