[Incubator] longer term approaches to an OSGeo Stack

[Cameron Shorter]

I agree with Frank's principles below which have served us well to date, 
and I think we should keep them.

I propose now that OSGeo and our software is maturing, we should 
recognise the increased quality of our projects through the OSGeo brand. 
I see this taking the form of increasing criteria for incubation (or 
whatever we may decide to call the OSGeo Quality brand).

The format for increasing quality is something that we can apply 
gradually and will need to have caveats as there are differences between 
projects.
But I suggest a timeframe for quality criteria should include something 
like:

within 6 months: 1 page flier describing the project
within 12 months: Packaging of project into LiveDVD  or debian, or osgeo4win
within 18 months: Tutorials on how to use core functionality for the project
within 2 years: Tutorials for all functionality
within 3 years: Training material incorporated into tertiary education 
courses / OSGeo reference book

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>
> 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".


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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