[Live-demo] Alternative to describing maturity with stars?

[Johan Van de Wauw]

I've only recently joined this list, so maybe someone suggested this
already: you could include something like the info that ohloh gives in
their analysis summary. Eg: http://www.ohloh.net/p/saga-gis

Apart from the project summary, I rather believe in a 'task view'
approach of rating software. Looking for a program to do digital
terrain analysis? program x,y are well suited. z is less suited, and
the others cannot do it. Want to create good looking maps? z and y are
well suited, ... Point to relevant documentation for that task, which
may even be using different tools together, eg R and saga (eg [1]), a
type of documentation which now has no real place on the disk.

Not exactly the type of comparison one creates quickly overnight, but
if others are interested we can work on this for a next release
(and/or the website)?

[1]http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/a-practical-guide-to-geostatistical-mapping/6379057
On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/07/10 16:25, Hamish wrote:
>
> Cameron wrote:
>
> We could specify maturity as a string, of maturity levels, with the current maturity in bold, like:
>
> Maturity: (mature | *established* | stable | beta)
>
> This still helps users distinguish between projects, without stars.
> Would that address people's concerns?
>
> Sounds good to me (although I don't really see the need to list the unused words; seems obvious).
>
> I just couldn't see giving a project like GMT with 1000s of spottings in journals like Science and Nature a 2/5 == "stable" star rating and not have someone in the audience saying 'wtf?' ..
>
> what would the difference between "mature" and "established" be? how about vs .stable?
>
> Hamish,
> We could provide a hyperlink to a description of the maturity terms, which would contain something link:
>
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Artefacts#Maturity_Rating
>
> A 5 star rating system to qualify the how established a project is. Rating is to be broken down as follows:
>
> (mature): Project has passed osgeo incubation as per: http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/project_graduation_checklist.html
> (established): Project has Stable Software, a Stable community, is deployed in production systems, and is ready to pass criteria to enter incubation, as per: http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/evaluation.html
> (stable): Project has Stable Software.
>
> Project produces periodic releases of stable software which is used in production systems.
>
> (beta): Project has Beta software.
>
> Alex,
> While I'd prefer to use the words "graduated" and "in incubation", I've found these words to be completely useless at OSGeo booths when talking to newbies. Most don't know what OSGeo is, and if they do, they have no idea what the incubation process is and what it means. Hence the move to mature/established/stable/beta. Which I agree is only slightly better, but I can' think of better words, and I'm not getting much support for use of a star rating system.