Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Evolution of project management

During the first years of the project, the user community was still small, almost 

nonexistent. Every new user deserved extra attention and had to slowly be con-

vinced that the project was worth working with and that it would not suddenly 

die, leaving these early adopters with empty hands (and an upset boss). New func-

tionality was added after consultation with the participating UN agencies. The 

project management relied on one person (the author of this chapter) the so-

called benevolent dictator. The role of a benevolent dictator is to manage the 

project with the intention to involve a wider user community and take decisions 

that take the common needs into account. Such project management is very suit-

able during the startup phase of a project. Overhead in project management is 

kept to a relatively small size and implementation of new functionality is not 

 hampered by bureaucratic processes that involve people that are not aware of the 

day-to-day developments that take place. It proved an effective way to grow the 

software and the user community.

In 2005 FAO and WFP organized a first GeoNetwork workshop that was open 

to interested parties. The community started to grow and with a larger communi-

ty, expectations also increased and so did our responsibilities towards the com-

munity. We were in general able to make our own decisions without the need for 

long public discussions, but this started to change. We needed to get more formal 

and more transparent in our decision making. When in 2006 the OSGeo was 

 established, we wanted to make GeoNetwork a more open community project 

that was not solely relying on the FAO and its partner agencies. A project steering 

com mittee was created during the second GeoNetwork workshop in April that 

year. Day to day management remained under the control of the benevolent dic-

tator. The developer group was not solid enough to take over. However, this was 

about to change.

With the development team growing in size, experience and ready to accept 

 greater responsibility, incubation into OSGeo became a viable option.

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