Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
Specifically ways to encourage new developers to take part in existing projects - you are correct that it is a form of out reach. You will also notice that the code sprints have been a very successful undertaking, indeed one of the best ways we know of to encourage collaboration. I am sure there are other ways as a foundation we can encouraging the development side of the street? I will need to think more to understand the comment about software development; my best guess is email lists like metacrs where numbers are thrown around in anger to make sure the projects actually produce the same result (or know why they are different). I am sure test data where the IP was known to be clear would also help. -- Jody Garnett On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 2:44 PM, Tyler Mitchell wrote: Are you thinking more like looking for ways to encourage new developers or to specifically funding new development? I've always had the sense that, organisationally speaking, it's harder to do specific things like that since OSGeo doesn't really get involved in the development side of the projects (outside of incubation requirements). My other sense has assumed that the projects themselves know the best ways to help enlist more programmers or find funding for more programming - but I've been wrong before! There were one or two comments in the survey suggesting that OSGeo should NOT be so outward focused (e.g. into marketing the projects), but should be focused more on software development. I struggle to wrap my mind around this since I have always seen OSGeo's goal as primarily for outreach to get the software products into more hands. As far I can recall, no one ever said hey, we should start an organisation to improve development and share a code repository - since the projects had been chugging away pretty well long before the .org ever existed. Instead the idea was to collaborate on outreach, with shared web services and project-level sponsorship programs being a nice side effect. My memory might be selective here though, I am aging. ;) I don't think that's where you were aiming though, but would love to hear more details about what you were thinking. Make sense? Thanks! Tyler On 2011-05-12, at 9:30 PM, Jody Garnett wrote: If I can put in 2 cents for something that seems to have been missed: supporting open source development. I know developers are mostly self motivating; but just like target areas devoted to use it would be good to see some target areas devoted to development. -- Jody Garnett On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 5:30 AM, Tyler Mitchell wrote: View online: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2 We just hit 100 respondents on my recent survey! You can still chime in with your thoughts on the direction and priorities for OSGeo: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey The first two questions were around priority target areas, basically constituents/groups/areas that we should, collectively, spend more time working with e.g. Academic, business, government, etc. The first question just asked if they were good ideas and the results were all pretty much positive - but with Academic development coming out on top with the highest number of this is important votes. The second question forced voters to make a decision and rank the ideas from least to most important. Again, Academic development came out on top. I'll crunch some more stats later, but thought you might find this graph interesting. Sorry if you don't like 6 axis graphs :) See the graph: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2 The area within the blue line represents those who voted unimportant for the topic and within the red line those who voted important. These are aggregates of least important, low importance vs fairly, very, most important. Marginal importance was ignored for this graph. Note the larger the gap between the red and blue lines on an axis shows a greater difference in voting preference. The two rings represent 50% and 100% of votes. Even from this perspective it shows a very strong support for the academic idea, with Government in second. Then Open Standards and Open Data. Not a perfect summary but it's got me thinking and thought you might find it interesting too. More to come when I get a chance to dig through the numbers. Thanks to all who voted!___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Jody Garnett wrote: If I can put in 2 cents for something that seems to have been missed: supporting open source development. I know developers are mostly self motivating; but just like target areas devoted to use it would be good to see some target areas devoted to development. Jody, I can see a lot of coding going on inside different organisations but the solutions never find their way back into the core software because of a disconnect to the core developers of the projects. In a proposal for a EU-funded project I am now trying to directly address this. One sub task is dedicatged to hosting code sprints which focus on the needs of collective user groups. There are now loads of requirements arising from INSPIRE for example. The idea is to get funding from the organisations to support the work of the developers - and at the same time get users and developers closer together. Not sure whether this works but it is my best try at closing this gap so far. And it might open new funding streams which so far are left unexplored. Cheers, Arnulf - -- Exploring Space, Time and Mind http://arnulf.us -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAk3M5bYACgkQXmFKW+BJ1b14MQCfc3rTD4eEsGFlEqu6an68rU9b MmYAniww71ENSxR34RWnXzDZc4H1y9r0 =gxLm -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Simon Cropper wrote: Tyler, On 13/05/11 05:30, Tyler Mitchell wrote: Even from this perspective it shows a very strong support for the academic idea, with Government in second. Then Open Standards and Open Data. It would be interesting to get a summary of the participant background. was their more academic respondents resulting in a bias? I wonder what the chart would look like if you extracted the broad OSGeo groups (academics, government, developers, users) and presented the same charts, whether they would show academics favoured work with academics, government with governments, etcetera. Tyler, thanks for the outreach effort and surveys. Nice graph at: http://www.osgeo.org/tyler/2011/osgeo-survey-graph2 One thing that obviously cannot come out of surveys are things that are not being asked. The other thing that cannot come out of surveys are the opinions of those who are not being asked. This makes this type of survey kind of introverted because it asks about existing Memes inside a distinct community. This is a good excercise but ignores the outside which might have different ideas altogether. To me it is difficult to understand why someone now not connected with us would want to invest into OSGeo. But I am sure that there are many ventures to explore. The question is now how to trace and then mine them? One things that have been on my radar for a while is that public administrations are a prefect target for long time funding and sponsoring. But so far we proven that we are incapable of acessing this source of income. I guess that we need some kine of outside help to get this done. Best regards, Arnulf - -- Exploring Space, Time and Mind http://arnulf.us -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAk3M+dMACgkQXmFKW+BJ1b1/uwCeKCADvTcOdtzokyOXkduHmKuk PNMAn3atxJv94EV+t2OHe6JhejLCYZmm =Kw6T -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
Good Thinking Arnulf: As indicated this is the basic challenge of open source; how to keep patches coming in, reviewed and applied to the codebase. I can see a lot of coding going on inside different organisations but the solutions never find their way back into the core software because of a disconnect to the core developers of the projects. One thing I can recommend is the community module system we have adopted for GeoTools and GeoServer. It makes the barrier to entry very low. Now we could stand some more success bridging the gap between those working on community modules and the central project; but it at least gives us a pool of developers who are a) building the project and b) have commit access to the repository. In a proposal for a EU-funded project I am now trying to directly address this. One sub task is dedicatged to hosting code sprints which focus on the needs of collective user groups. There are now loads of requirements arising from INSPIRE for example. The idea is to get funding from the organisations to support the work of the developers - and at the same time get users and developers closer together. Not sure whether this works but it is my best try at closing this gap so far. And it might open new funding streams which so far are left unexplored. It is a good direction; and may foster interoperability between projects as well. At the very least shared test data would be a good win. Jody ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
Tyler, On 13/05/11 05:30, Tyler Mitchell wrote: Even from this perspective it shows a very strong support for the academic idea, with Government in second. Then Open Standards and Open Data. It would be interesting to get a summary of the participant background. was their more academic respondents resulting in a bias? I wonder what the chart would look like if you extracted the broad OSGeo groups (academics, government, developers, users) and presented the same charts, whether they would show academics favoured work with academics, government with governments, etcetera. -- Cheers Simon Simon Cropper Principal Consultant Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd PO Box 160, Sunshine, VIC W: www.botanicusaustralia.com.au ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
On 2011-05-12, at 3:53 PM, Simon Cropper wrote: It would be interesting to get a summary of the participant background. was their more academic respondents resulting in a bias? I wonder what the chart would look like if you extracted the broad OSGeo groups (academics, government, developers, users) and presented the same charts, whether they would show academics favoured work with academics, government with governments, etcetera. It's a good question and I didn't capture that kind of information - though I did skim through the list of emails that were provided and I didn't notice too many .edu or related addresses, but that's not definitive for sure. There is another set of questions around improvements that tied in nicely too. The takeaway from my perspective - majority of voters think docs/training material need significant improvement and that they believe having OSGeo software in the labs at academic institutions is a good idea. I am guessing that business didn't score higher on the first question simply because most businesses aren't thinking that they need OSGeo to do something to help them. Lots more conversation to have to get our finger on the true pulse there though too! It's going to be a fun summer hashing through some of these ideas for sure. Tyler___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A few survey stats
Are you thinking more like looking for ways to encourage new developers or to specifically funding new development? I've always had the sense that, organisationally speaking, it's harder to do specific things like that since OSGeo doesn't really get involved in the development side of the projects (outside of incubation requirements). My other sense has assumed that the projects themselves know the best ways to help enlist more programmers or find funding for more programming - but I've been wrong before! There were one or two comments in the survey suggesting that OSGeo should NOT be so outward focused (e.g. into marketing the projects), but should be focused more on software development. I struggle to wrap my mind around this since I have always seen OSGeo's goal as primarily for outreach to get the software products into more hands. As far I can recall, no one ever said hey, we should start an organisation to improve development and share a code repository - since the projects had been chugging away pretty well long before the .org ever existed. Instead the idea was to collaborate on outreach, with shared web services and project-level sponsorship programs being a nice side effect. My memory might be selective here though, I am aging. ;) I don't think that's where you were aiming though, but would love to hear more details about what you were thinking. Make sense? Thanks! Tyler On 2011-05-12, at 9:30 PM, Jody Garnett wrote: If I can put in 2 cents for something that seems to have been missed: supporting open source development. I know developers are mostly self motivating; but just like target areas devoted to use it would be good to see some target areas devoted to development. -- Jody Garnett On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 5:30 AM, Tyler Mitchell wrote: View online: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2 We just hit 100 respondents on my recent survey! You can still chime in with your thoughts on the direction and priorities for OSGeo: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey The first two questions were around priority target areas, basically constituents/groups/areas that we should, collectively, spend more time working with e.g. Academic, business, government, etc. The first question just asked if they were good ideas and the results were all pretty much positive - but with Academic development coming out on top with the highest number of this is important votes. The second question forced voters to make a decision and rank the ideas from least to most important. Again, Academic development came out on top. I'll crunch some more stats later, but thought you might find this graph interesting. Sorry if you don't like 6 axis graphs :) See the graph: http://bit.ly/osgeosurvey2 The area within the blue line represents those who voted unimportant for the topic and within the red line those who voted important. These are aggregates of least important, low importance vs fairly, very, most important. Marginal importance was ignored for this graph. Note the larger the gap between the red and blue lines on an axis shows a greater difference in voting preference. The two rings represent 50% and 100% of votes. Even from this perspective it shows a very strong support for the academic idea, with Government in second. Then Open Standards and Open Data. Not a perfect summary but it's got me thinking and thought you might find it interesting too. More to come when I get a chance to dig through the numbers. Thanks to all who voted!___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
