I attended the osgeo board meeting this week, to check in on CRA stuff. One topic was the upcoming 2024 budget. We should think about development priorities for both sponsorship and osgeo funding (or make a default request for an operational budget).
Aside: If we do have any operational budget left over for 2024 we should consider sponsoring mkdocs both to acknowledge their work, and it would unlock some new features.
Thanks for sharing how Geotools is handling this.
A couple of years ago, GeoNetwork made the statement that it would really help to have sponsorship for all the gardening around the GeoNetwork project:
code reviews
technical depth
documentation
communication
and so on
Unfortunately, we didn’t really follow this up as we didn’t really figure out what was a good way to do it.
I think that creating a wiki page about the budget, and showing the need of sponsoring for background chore tasks will be a good starting point.
We should discuss that during the next board meeting.
I like the phrase gardening to describe all care and feeding activities. The sheer number of open pull requests would be great thing to address:
a) consider a small contract a couple times a year; a committee with time could bid on this. Similar to OSGeo sys admin committee function.
b) a small sprint to review PRs with sponsorship to support cost recovery model; like recent remove opengis activity was done.
For the open pull request - three things that have helped geotools:
a check list to place more responsibility for testing on submitter
lots of automated checks, the initial pain is worth it
automate code formatting (gasp) to minimize conflicts when back porting etc…
a bot to close stale pull requests, the mental weight of over a thousand PRs must be so hard on core-geonetwork team.
With respect to budget planning - I also encourage the team, especially service providers, to catch up on CRA changes required to operate in Europe as they take shape.
It is my hope that we can use the reduced obligations of OSGeo as a software foundation to share some of these new overheads; leaving a smaller amount of work for service providers to manage with respect to their customer relationships. I am interested in setting up procedures that require participation up front; if a security response is required on 24 hours, service providers would need to monitor a private list to be in position to inform their customers.
You may wish to hang back and let geoserver team sort it out, and then learn from our mistakes. But do plan to make decisions in 2024.
