[Qgis-psc] Next meeting and some thoughts on our approach to project governance

[Nyall Dawson]

On 18 February 2016 at 04:26, ElPaso <elpaso at itopen.it> wrote:

>
> I understand Andreas's point of view, but I feel that the missing point in
> the equation is that QGIS is a community-driven free (as in speech)
> software.
>
> IMHO, having a vibrant community on a free software project is much more
> important than having a business/enterprise software.
>

I've been watching this discussion from afar. Something I've been
thinking might help during this transitional time is for us to put
some work into defining what our priorities for the project are and
what it would mean for QGIS to be "successful". There's tons of valid
(and possibly competing) ways we could measure this, eg:

- having a vibrant and active contributor community
- stability of releases with a decreasing number of open bug reports
- amount of financial investment into the QGIS project
- number of features in QGIS and a decreasing number of open feature requests
- growing number of ongoing regular QGIS users
- ratio of pro QGIS tweets vs anti-QGIS (I'd estimate we currently sit
at about 20:1 ;) )
- low user frustration measured via mailing list and stackexchange posts
- membership of local user groups and attendance at QGIS events
- ease of developing QGIS and low learning curve for new contributors
- Pitney Bowes finally conceding defeat and giving up on MapInfo development
- growing enterprise uptake of QGIS and businesses/freelancers
involved in the QGIS ecosystem
- number of beautiful QGIS maps published via flickr/twitter/etc
- ....

If we had a clear idea of our priorities as a project then it would
make it much easier to decide how competing decisions can be made. Eg
if we value maintaining a vibrant community higher than stability of
releases then QGIS funds would be better spent on hackfest attendance
over sponsored bug fixing.

I realise that everyone has their own individual list of desires of
what they want to get out of the project, but I think it's really
important to have some form of agreed priorities and metrics for
measuring our success as an organisation. Possibly even just having a
mission statement for the QGIS organisation would provide this.

Nyall

(PS. My personal view is that the QGIS project is very much in a time
of transition right now. There's no denying that user, enterprise and
corporate interest in QGIS is growing exponentially (regardless of
whether or not this is a bad thing), and that things are becoming
formalised (eg foundation of QGIS organisation). It's totally expected
that there's going to be growing pains as these changes occur, and I
think discussions like this are a natural consequence following the
growth in popularity of the project).