dear all, I'd like to add some more reflections based on the experience of OSGeo and its incubation committee. OSGeo is primarily a software foundation, but there are some parallels.
Incubation is managed by a committee which has at least one representative from every current project. A new project comes along, the maintainer fills out a comprehensive questionnaire. http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/application.html Aim of this is to let the committee decide whether the project will eventually meet the criteria for *graduation* from the incubator. So the project must already be reasonably healthy, have a group of committers, ideally some from outside of the organisation that started the project. It should be *on track* to establish good governance (not a benevolent dictatorship), have the beginnings of a project infrastructure (open repository, bug tracker, lists etc). And these are the criteria a project has to meet to achieve graduation. http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/project_graduation_checklist.html While in the incubator the project will have a mentor - the mentor should be someone involved with an existing project, one that doesn't overlap too much in topic area, implementation language, etc. A person can only mentor one project at a time; there is a limit of about 10 projects that can be in the incubator at any given time. What happens next? Graduating from the incubator means a seal of approval - of quality and reliability of code, reasonable assurance that it really is free and open, and some guarantee of the future persistence of the project beyond the original authors - all the things that business users of free software are looking for. The incubation committee makes recommendations to the Board both to incubate projects and to graduate them - I can't remember ever having seen one sent back in 3 years on the Board. So there's a high level of trust/delegation involved (and there was a lot of overlap between the original active board members and the original incubation committee). The process *is* pretty selective. Very young, prototype projects end up in a much more informal "OSGeo Labs" vehicle - http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Labs - this has a much lower barrier to entry, self-assessment, and is a way of registering interest in eventually incubating, and of gathering people to the effort - more serious than a sourceforge project, but not serious enough yet to deal with the overhead of incubation. To me, these two things are at the heart of the incubator: * Quality assurance * Mentorship There's more process overhead than OKF is likely to need - but that process is meant to help guarantee quality in the work and reliability for end-users. There's as much focus on getting projects *out* of the incubator as getting them in. What would it mean for OKF for a project to have left the incubator - not that it is "finished" (is anything digital ever finished?) but that it is vouched for - that to say "This is an OKFN project" is to be said with pride - it is a mark of quality and of persistence. I have the idea that there are quite a few funds, labs, foundations etc aiming to start projects up, create prototypes and provide bootstrap infrastructure. If we look at the OSGeo model, an OKF incubator could be a place for those projects to go, and have a stable home, once the principle is proved. On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Michael Fourman <[email protected]> wrote: > Professor Michael Fourman FBCS CITP > Director, iDEA lab Michael, I'm just down the street from you, working at EDINA, and I would love to meet up for a coffee sometime. cheers all, jo -- _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
