Community Support

• Maintain Web Infrastructure & Content
• Organise Conferences and Events

Maintain Web Infrastructure & Content

The community requires a stable, yet active, organisation to provide a set of infrastructure components. This will include hosting and maintaining web servers, mailing lists, forums, newsletters, etc. A web site is often the first thing seen by new users/explorers. It must be well supported by hardware, bandwidth and administrators who can respond quickly to problems and, where required, moderate content.

The need for a meritocratic method for assigning individual responsibilities in supporting the infrastructure is key to ongoing quality assurance and community satisfaction.

The success of the infrastructure components will be measured by the ability for new users to find content, accessibility to the community, web site stability and professional look and feel across all components.

Organise Conferences and Events

A central conference for the community helps keep momentum and enthusiasm growing. It brings in new users to see what others are doing and how they can benefit from the tools/technology. A foundation will help stabilise how conferences are organised, and, hopefully, also managing associated funding so that longer term conference plans are not inhibited by the large investments needed.

A foundation will also provide additional resources for organising more regional events to bring together users who are, geographically, near one another. This is critical for the immediate future development of the community as it has begun to outstrip resources at a global level and needs more personalised, localised, support. This will also provide a venue for local organisations to help promote foundation projects to their communities in a meaningful way.

Developer Support

• Maintain Developer Infrastructure
• Goverance & Proposal Development

Maintain Developer Infrastructure

Developers have needs for long-term, stable, tools such as CVS, mailing lists, bug tracking and automated build tools. This is the same requirement that the community has, but at a slightly different level. Developers usually pull together the resources they need, from among themselves or as needed. A foundation will ensure that a common, progressive and agreed upon set of tools is consistently available for them.

Goverance & Proposal Development

The foundation will provide a formal governance framework for developers to use and improve. This will help track development road maps for technical direction, including requests for features, etc. When possible, the foundation will be able to fund development efforts which are not a key community priority but are necessary for long-term stability.

The foundation will be the portal for new proposals and will track developer votes, discussion, etc.

Promotion

• Dedicated Promotion Direction
• Promotional Material Development
• Promotional Presentations
• News and Press Releases
• Training Material Development
• User Group Support

Dedicated Promotion Direction

The is no current direction for the promotion of many projects. Some direction may be planned within a company or organisation, but the community at large is very loosely coupled. This can be improved by having a foundation that has a mandate to aid in the promotion of its projects. This can happen on many fronts and should not be limited to web site management and conference organisation. Several other opportunities exist as well, some of which involve spending money, others help bring in funds to the foundation and others only need in-time contributions.

Promotional Material Development

Material needs to be available for users and managers to find at conferences, on the web, in a community or faculty, etc. Or for promoters to take and hand out at events. Ideally, a booth display will be developed to show off foundation products. Brochures and posters will be developed. Example applications and map gallery-style material will be collected from the community and structured in a consistent manner for publication to target audiences.

Promotional material will address myths, describe features, provide example use cases, report on benchmark comparisons and link to commercial resources. All with the focus of bringing foundation projects to a larger audience.

Promotional Presentations

The foundation will support members who can serve as speakers at conferences, by providing presentation material about its projects. The foundation will serve as a clearinghouse for related presentation material to draw from.

Speakers may also be sent to organisations (e.g. government) or companies who need to learn more or who need a good sales pitch. This may help serve as a 'lobby' group to bring specific tools into more organisations.

News and Press Releases

The foundation will serve as the primary means of communicating developments of interest to the community in general, but also to media at large. This serves as a both community update and a public promotion.

Training Material Development

Planning and execution of training workshops takes concentrated effort. Likewise the development of training material and formal documentation takes focus. The foundation will help collate this material and improve it where possible.

Academic Support & Extension

A particular focus will be to support the use of foundation projects and tools in academic (and other non-profit) environments. This will include the development of course material and help drive development into areas where there are particular academic needs.

Students will benefit from having cost-effective access to and training on a powerful web mapping environment, without costly licensing or vendor lock-in. Likewise, a commitment to supporting education will garner interest from funding agencies and volunteers who hold education in high esteem.

User Group Support

Regional user groups need support for planning, securing or providing speakers for events. They also need to have a central place for getting material or other resources from, including new user group member registration, etc. This would fit the model of some of the broader Linux User Group web sites.

Manage Brand

• Protecting the Brand
• Certification Strategy

Protecting the Brand

Many companies are depending on projects as core products for their clients. This makes the particular brands incredibly important to their business. In some cases, the services a company provides may not be taken seriously if the open source brand looks unprofessional or has a bad reputation.

With this in mind, a foundation should help protect the brand. This could be one of the most critical roles of a foundation in the future. This can be done to varying degrees such as holding the copyright to the source code, trademarking the product name, maintaining official logos, etc.

Certification Strategy

As a foundation develops it will be valuable to have a certification program. Foundation-approved training and testing would yield an official certification to an organisation, allowing the use of a special logo or access to a more intimate support network. Having a certification program would help raise the professional appearance of the product and its users. It could also help raise some funds for the foundation by charging a fee for certification testing.

Legal Guardian

A foundation will help be the front-man for any legal issues that come up relating to the foundation projects. To date, as far as I know, there have not been any legal problems (i.e. with MapServer). I'm sure there have been legal 'issues' - e.g. where a company may want to contribute or use products but have been limited in some way legally.

Isolate Developers

Organisations such the Apache Foundation exist almost solely to protect developers from legal battles. Therefore, funds may be directed toward legal help for the foundation. The individuals, organisations or companies that donate the code may not be attacked if another organisation holds the rights (and responsibilities) related to the product.

Ensure Openness

This also means that contributors must provide clean code that is legally unencumbered. Ensuring that this is the case, is a key role for a foundation. This will make the long term viability of projects much more possible, by keeping out allegations of stolen source code or the like.

Develop Funds for Product Development

Many people think of foundations as being funding mechanisms for non-profit societies. This foundation would not fit that definition, but may have a funding component to it for various reasons.

Accept Donations

Some organisations use tools yet may not be comfortable giving money to commercial entities to further develop the product. By having a foundation that can accept donations, the organisations can easily donate funds and have assurance that they will properly distributed.

Administer Donations

The most important factor may be that a donation be clearly tied to an open source output - a foundation can make sure this happens. The foundation can be trusted to find and fund the right developer to work on the priorities of the project.

Solicit Funding

The foundation can act as a formal entity that requests funding from various sources. Government programmes, for example, may be available only to non-profit organisations. The foundation can solicit funding on behalf of the community.

Likewise, some commercial or academic funding sources may require that products remain open source or publicly accessible. By having the foundation administer the funding, this can be guaranteed.

It is not always possible or realistic for members of the community to directly solicit funds for development. In this case, a foundation can be a benign entity (especially if it has tax-exempt status) that solicits funding from commercial sources. The funds are then rolled into community projects for development, infrastructure, grants, etc.

Award Proposals

In some cases, where a foundation has significant funds for grants, a foundation can play a central role in soliciting and evaluating project funding proposals. The foundation can also be used to administer scholarships, help fund work experience/job exchanges or other types of financial awards.

For-fee Services

A foundation may need to find innovative ways of acquiring funds for offsetting internal costs. One way to do this is by having for-fee services such as consulting, presentations and workshops. There could also be book sales, web site advertising and customised programming projects. In some cases, members of the community volunteer their time to help raise funds for the foundation.

New Project Adoption

Some new products may be developed that would be better served by adoption into the foundation. There should be a foundation-led process for assessing the feasibility of adoption and ensuring the compliance of new code/projects being adopted.