Technical Ramblings

At the OSGeo Board meeting in Barcelona, we discussed many things, but one of the topics of special interest to me is the simple question: “What is OSGeo all about?”

The first place to look for that, of course, is the website; although many parts of the website address many specific problems, there is one place that we define what OSGeo is really about: the mission statement. It says that the Mission of OSGeo is:

To support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use.

When we started our board discussions, there was one word missing there: the “collaborative” is something we voted to add, something I was very supportive of. There are many organizations (Sencha being a significant example in the space I work in) where organizations are developing Open Source software that is not openly developed. OSGeo is not about that: instead, it’s about encouraging exactly the opposite.

One of the most important things that OSGeo incubation does is ensure that a project is collaboratively developed. We seek for projects with a reasonably broad base of support, in terms of both developers and users. We seek to encourage community; our default project setup uses open, widely available collaborative development tools.

We host dozens of mailing lists. We have a single login account that gives access to the bug trackers for more than a dozen projects. We seek the broadest interaction between projects possible in order to foster a collaborative environment.

OSGeo is a really interesting case for this type of foundation work, because we have such a broad collection of projects despite the narrow scope. Databases. Web servers — both Map and other GIS related. Clients. Data manipulation libraries. Metadata catalogs. All of them interact at almost every stage of the process. Interoperability of this software is a key way to make the Open Source geospatial world more successful, and something we do relatively well.

So, if anyone ever asks you: What does OSGeo do? The answer, at its heart, is: “Support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software.” And I’m pretty thrilled with both the goal, and the success so far.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 5:54 am and is filed under FOSS4G 2010, Locality and Space, OSGeo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.