[Incubator] Reasons to bring a project to OSGeo Labs

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

I was glad to read Alex's and Cameron's thoughts on OSGeo Labs.

We're inching towards taking a work project open source, and I'm 
wondering if we should try to bring it to Labs - and why to do so.

The project is a set of web services in several parts - a gazetteer 
cross-search service and a "geoparser" text mining toolset. These have 
been developed as research infrastructure, partly at the EDINA 
datacentre, partly by the Language Technology Group at the University of 
Edinburgh. The service has funding til next summer, then is up for 
review. http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/ is what's running.

What are the reasons I would want to put this project in OSGeo Labs?
(As opposed to the reasons I want to take it open source at all)

1) *internal* marketing benefit for upper management here and the 
University's R&I office - Labs would show we are thinking about the 
process seriously, not just throwing code onto GitHub and hoping for the 
best, but working on governance and trying to build community

2) *external* marketing benefit for potential users - a similar gesture 
of faith for third parties, that the code will have a life beyond the 
guaranteed life of the service itself.

Why Labs not incubation? As a project moving from de facto closed to 
open source, there's really no community yet (there is a trickle of 
people asking about the code, but who knows if they'd contribute).
It's far too early to tell if the project could one day incubate.

It is useful to know that there is already overdemand on OSGeo 
infrastructure, where github, sourceforge or even OSOR would do the job 
just fine, and I wouldn't ask for that (although a delegated 
labs.osgeo.org subdomain could be nice)

Is there a time limit for being in Labs? E.g. if after two years, there 
is no progress into incubation (and no other factors preventing it) 
should a project move out of Labs? Will that create negative PR?


cheers,


jo
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