Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Building a community of users and developers

An active and healthy user and developer community around GeoNetwork 

 ensures that new functionality is constantly added and existing functions are fur-

ther improved. New developments in the global “GeoWeb“ can be quickly tested 

and  integrated if useful. The community almost doubles on a yearly basis. The 

project moved under the umbrella of the Open-Source Geospatial Foundation (OS-

Geo) in 2008. This move increased the collaboration with other geospatial open-

source software projects and improved the long term sustainability and reliability 

as quality software that takes open-source software development as a community 

process very serious. People that see their own needs and contributions taken se-

riously are the involved users and developers that make the community. The ma-

jority of users are silent consumers, only a fraction signs up on the mailing lists to 

ask questions, discuss, provide feedback or help others by answering questions.

The active user group is key to the success of the project; they give the project 

hands and feet and let it prosper. An even smaller group actively customizes the 

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software and contributes back to the project in the form of bug fixes, small im-

provements and translations of the application into new languages. A group of 

about fifteen developers works on different so-called sandboxes, places where 

customized versions of GeoNetwork are developed and maintained. The new 

functionality developed in these sandboxes is often what is proposed to become 

part of the core software. The process of proposing new functions and adding 

them to the core has been formalized and requires a voting by the Project Steer-

ing Committee. Only a limited number of developers have the right to modify the 

core software, ensuring that the code will be well integrated and that quality is 

maintained at a good standard.