Standard for communication between project infrastructures

I see the way forward as a Foundation Board (free to join as individual contributors, not permited for companies) that establishes community standards on all collaboration resources.

Such a standard should include what kind of information should be contained in a bug report, and this could in turn be implemented as a RDF resource. As far as I have seen LaunchPad already provides RDF resources for bugs. This way there would be an easy transition between different project infrastructures: maybe one will be able to take all the bugs (closed or open) her/his project has on Source Forge and have them automatically imported, as a batch, into LaunchPad or CollabNet.

For project infrastructure there are also tools like Maven, which ads the goodness of dependency management. We should check the effectiveness of Maven and similar tools, find their weakest spot and make a request to the responsible team to improve that feature.

I also think we need to research more thoroughly a free software development methodology. We do not like some Agile or XP programming ways of doing things, so we need our own methodology/-ies. There are some academic studies on our development model but they are scatterd across different web sites. The idea is that we do need a more structured, integrated documentation tool on how we do/should work.

This research is needed to prepare the infrastructure we will use 2,4,8 years from now, when both the number and the diversity of contributors to our community will grow immensely.