Mapbender migration to the Open Soure Geospatial Foundation

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi All,
we are happy to announce that we are migrating the Mapbender Project to 
the Open Source Geospatial Foundation platform. Our new home - hopefully 
for years to come - will be:

http://mapbender.osgeo.org

The good message is: You will not have to do anything ...yet. This is 
just a first information on what is going to happen in the next months.

If you want to get involved during the transition you are invited to 
create yourself an account to access the OSGeo site and thus be able to 
browse, read, join and cooperate with all the other OSGeo Foundation 
projects. Just hit <create account> in the top right corner of:
http://www.osgeo.org
on the "create account" link and follow the instructions.

Subscribe to the Mapbender announce and user list (this one: 
users at mapbender.osgeo.org), that way you stay informed about what is 
going on. As we are one of the first projects to move in, the site is 
still somewhat empty, but that is going to change quickly within the 
next few months when MapServer, MapGuide Open Source, Mapbuilder, 
GeoTools, GeoServer, GDAL/OGR and all the other top of the notch 
projects are going to join us.

Once you have created an account you can join the Mapbender Development, 
User or Test Team with specific roles as Contributer, Developer, 
Observer, User, QualityManager or any combination of these. Once you 
know what you think your role might be, ask for it by hitting the 
corresponding button. You will find everything, it is very well 
organized but obviously a little more complex due to the more 
professional scope of the site.

For the next few days / weeks we will answer requests on all mailing 
lists but will always point people to the new list addresses, so that we 
can stop using the current SourceForge lists. Once we all think that 
this has worked fine we will also migrate the larger user list and try 
to do this with as little friction as possible. We have moved the devel 
list first in the hope to sort out any problems and make it easier for 
the standard users.

This Wiki / web site is going to stay where it is for the time being, we 
are still working out with CollabNet on how to best integrate it into 
the OSGeo Foundation Infrastructure.

There are for sure going to be minor problems - thats how software works 
- but we are positive that the migration to the OSGeo platform will give 
us a head start and help to integrate even better with all the other 
Foundation Projects. Just try to warm yourself to the idea that we are 
taking the next of improving our Open Source Software development 
skills. Use the discussion page int he Wiki to post any ideas. Request 
for an account to edit this Wiki at uli at osgeo.org or arnulf at osgeo.org.

Thanx for your help and have fun!

With best regards, the Mapbender PSC