[Incubator] Oskari Incubation status

Thu Jul 5 14:17:17 PDT 2018

Hi Arnulf,

Thanks for your detailed assessment. ...and yes, I did read to the bottom ;-)

I would like to see a response to your questions from Timo, or another representative of the Oskari community. In particular a response to the issues of open communities and decision making.

From what I’ve viewed on the project website, Oskari has considerable potential. However, good software is only part of the picture.

Having a good, strong, healthy and active community that is diverse and uses open processes will help the project to survive when funding from the major sponsor ceases.

Kind regards,

Bruce

> On 6 Jul 2018, at 03:02, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Arnulf, to answer your question at the bottom, yes I read to the bottom, and really appreciate your detailed assessment.
> 
> Based on Arnulf's assessment, it sounds like Sskari probably has a good codebase, with good work from within one organisation, but is yet to attract engaged external developers. This is a great milestone, and worth acknowledging. But the "unicorn" projects that we look for in OSGeo incubation are those with a healthy community from multiple organisations.
> 
> The "extent of collaboration" criteria provides validation of the quality of the project, and is a very good indicator of long term sustainability. 
> To the Oskari folks, you might want to read this presentation I gave a while back on business justifications for backing collaboration: 
> http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2017/11/open-source-pitch-for-your-boss.html
> 
> Without digging into the details any further, I suspect Oskari would need to work on attracting co-contributors, from multiple organisations, and we would likely see evidence of this happening by seeing archive logs of collaborative email lists, or slack or IRC or similar.
> 
> Warm regards, Cameron
> 
>> On 6/7/18 2:11 am, Arnulf Christl (Metaspatial) wrote:
>> Hi Folks, 
>> this is an update on the Incubation process of Oskari. 
>> https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Oskari_Incubation_Status
>> As mentor I am still somewhat hesitant to recommend Oskari for OSGeo Incubation because I cannot find a good indicator supporting that there is an open community and communication. Personally I know some of the current core team and totally trust them to work in the Open Source way of doing things. But this may not be quite apparent to anybody not into the project. 
>> Oskari is doing a good job posting news and updates to the OSGeo user list (https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oskari-user/) but the list is not really used by users for any kind of discussion, help or future development. It feels more like a low volume announce list (which is totally OK, so please keep it up). 
>> How and where is the development being discussed? Who can join the Oskari Slack channel - or whatever else is used to have technical and strategic discussions? Are there archives of discussions and decisions? Do you manage to do this in English or is it still everything communicated in Finnish? 
>> In a PSC presentation from December 2016 one bullet-point says that Oskari may become a project on OSGeo live: https://oskariorg.github.io/files/20161220-Oskari_OSGEO_PSC.pdf. 
>> 
>> Actually, Incubation is not a requirement, so please feel free to approach the OSGeo Live team to find out more.
>> In the Roadmap document (which in my opinion is actually ery good) at: https://github.com/oskariorg/oskari-docs/wiki/Roadmap-process you say that: 
>> "After communicating with Oskari community the roadmap items enter Active stage [...]". 
>> Can you give us an example of where and how this has happened? 
>> 
>> There are some updates on GitHub issues but it appears to be mostly internal team members (which is totally OK, is this where the collaborative aspect of the future development takes place? 
>> https://github.com/oskariorg/oskari-docs/labels/roadmap
>> 
>> Regarding Code Copyright Review you state that: 
>> All code has been developed by the registered developers listed on github who have signed the CLA. All external libraries have project compatible licenses. The project has been started as a regular Open Source project following the guidelines as set out by OSGeo. A file-per-file code review was therefore deemed superfluous.
>> 
>> As mentor I can confirm that this is correct and satisfies OSGeo's requirements (and yes, I did some quick checks on random code files but due to the well organized origin of the project did not go through all code like we had to in the GRASS project... :-).
>> 
>> In the last PSC meeting in December 2017 a decision was taken to schedule the next meeting "as needed".  
>> Meetings/activity
>> 
>> [...]
>> future meetings schedule: continue with “as needed” (no need for a fixed schedule)
>> Summarizing the current status: We discussed some of the above topics before and it is not a requirement for OSGeo Incubation to have active mailing lists and so on. But it is a requirement to have an open process and ideally also a somewhat growing user community. Obviously due its character as a complex portal platform Oskari is not a software that will have millions of downloads but a little broader adoption would be nice to see. 
>> You also say: 
>> Slack/Mailinglist can be used more actively to discuss any issues/voting
>> 
>> If you are not using the Slack channel (which unfortunately is not open), where is the communication taking place? 
>> The PSC meeting notes from December 2017 has a list of current installations / users / contributions. This is good to see. Has there been any additions, changes over the past half year? 
>> 
>> Even if you can not produce evidence for any or all of the above issues I will be happy to recommend Oskari for Incubation if you believe that this will help the project. Then it will be up to the Incubation committee to decide whether we can recommend graduation to the OSGeo Board of Directors. 
>> We will have to expect some discussion on the Incubation list on the above topics and this is not bad but a sign of a healthy process. 
>> 
>> Internal note to the Incubation committee 
>> IF you ever made it down to this line and maybe even checked some of the referenced documents, please be so kind as to acknowledge this on the mailing list so that we can help Oskari move on. 
>> It may also be a good idea to go back to the Incubation process and check whether it should be revised for certain aspects (especially requirement on mailing lists / alternatives like Slack).  
>> 
>> Anything else you need, let me know. 
>> 
>> Thank you, 
>> Arnulf
>> 
>> 
>>> Am 2018-06-25 um 17:05 schrieb Aarnio Timo (MML):
>>> Hi Incubator-list!
>>>  
>>> We’d like to inquire about the incubation status of Oskari. What are the next steps should be in the incubation process? In our end we’ve done everything we’ve realized that we have to do. But is there something still wanted from us? Or is the process in the OSGeo end now? If so, what are the steps there and is there possibly any estimate when we can think about graduating?
>>>  
>>> Kind regards,
>>> Timo Aarnio
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator
>> 
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> 
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> Cameron Shorter
> Technology Demystifier
> Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant
> 
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