A study on GRASS, gvSIG and QGIS communities based on indicators

Authors

• André Maneiro
• Francisco Puga
• Alberto Varela

Abstract

When selecting an aplication, it’s very common to weight tecnological factors -what the aplication enable us to do?- and economic ones -how many money do we need?. And yet, there is a third factor to take into account, the social side of the project: the community of users and developers who support it and make it be alive.

Along this paper, we show a quantitative analysis of communities from 3 reference projects in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) arena: GRASS, gvSIG and QGIS. We selected those, as they are viewed as the more mature projects in desktop GIS, they are under OSGEO Foundation umbrella and show some differences on the actors who bootstrapped and manage today.

Particulary, with the public information available for the projects, we have managed to build following indicators:

• Adoption trend within users and developers.
• Activity and manpower.
• Composition of the community: internationalization and volunteering .
• Generational analysis: leadership and knowledge transfering.

Download

Download the entire project (data, images, paper, etc) in either zip or tar formats.

Other specific downloads:

• [Spanish] The paper (PDF).
• [English] The slides (PDF).
• The dataset used to generate the indicators.

Material related

• [Spanish] Monographic of the V jornadas de SIG Libre. Includes a summary of the paper.
• [Spanish] Video presenting the paper in the V jornadas de SIG Libre:

You can also clone the project with Git by running:

$ git clone git://github.com/oandregal/foss4g-desktop-analysis