[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo community Maxed out?

[Frank Warmerdam]

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> I've noticed that OSGeo as a community seems to be Maxed out. When an 
> good idea is thrown out into the ether, people comment on it, but are 
> not following through with committment to the task.
 >
> This was not the case 6 months to a year ago when people were jumping in 
> left, right and center to help out.
> 
> I believe this is because the OSGeo community is now working at full 
> capacity of its current membership.

Cameron,

I agree to a large extent, though I think that ever since the
beginning we have talked about a lot more than we were capable
of actually acting on.  Nevertheless, I can see a saturation or
even over saturation being reached for many core folks, myself
included.

> Solutions:
> 1. Work more efficiently.
> 2. Stop coming up with good ideas.
> 3. Start recruiting around the edges of the OSGeo Community.
> Eg: For packaging the OSGeo Stack, we could draw upon the linux 
> packaging communities.

Working more efficiently is fine where it applies.

I don't think there is a need to stop coming up with good ideas.
But I will say that it is to be expected that we come up with more
good ideas than we can execute on, at least in the short term.
Sometimes ideas are floated, there is some interest, but no one takes
ownership so it sort of fades away.

This is the way of things in the open source world, and the world at
large.  Hopefully if something is sufficiently important/interesting
there will be someone willing to take on responsibility and it can
proceed.  Otherwise it sits on the shelf as an interesting idea, and
might be picked up at some point in the future.

> We are all Open Source community builders. No one should be more 
> qualified than us at extending our community.

That sounds reasonable. I do think we need to find ways for more
people to get involved.  In many cases there are people who are
interested in helping, but don't know how to help.  In other cases,
we haven't really reached out to the right people.  I think we need
to improve on both fronts, and that we will do so over time.

I certainly agree that with the current set of core community contributors
we are reaching a level of saturation.  The solution is new blood, and
helping existing folks who feel left out get involved.

We will also just have to be realistic about how much we can actually
accomplish.  Some worthwhile things will be left undone, and generally
thats ok as long as we don't leave really key items undone.

By the way, the OSGeo Stack effort is definately an example of an important
effort that is currently essentially inactive for lack of someone to
really take ownership.  In other circumstances, I'd be interested in
taking it on, but I'm feeling stretched very thin already.

I'd also say we don't seem to have quite reached a consensus on what
we are trying to achieve.  For instance there is still a lot of debate
about targetting specific linux distribution packaging systems, while I
(for one) think that is a mistake, and we need to take a distribution
agnostic approach even though I am very supportive of efforts by folks
like the Debian GIS team.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
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    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org