[Incubator] Reasons to bring a project to OSGeo Labs

[Cameron Shorter]

Hi Jo,
Sounds like your project is a good candidate for OSGeo Labs.
The idea behind Labs is to keep the barrier to entry low.
Do you pass the questions:
* "Am I Geospatial related?"
* "Am I Open Source?"
* "Do I hope to develop toward an OSGeo project in the future? There 
need not be a commitment to move to a graduated project, just a moving 
toward OSGeo ideals."

If you can answer "YES" to above, I'd encourage you to list your project 
on OSGeo Labs.

We regards to exiting OSGeo Labs. We have not yet worked out this 
process, however if the project has some activity, I don't see OSGeo 
pushing projects out. Grounds for pushing a project out would be if the 
project moves away from the above ideals, or if the project has become 
completely inactive, without any interest from users or developers.

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

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