Greenhouse Home

What?

This space is for information relating to the "TERENA Greenhouse" discussion.

The TERENA community produces a wide range of software outputs to support its goals. Some of these develop in to fully fledged services, some disappear, and others happily exist and are well supported on social-coding sites such as github. At various points in the life of a software project different support mechanisms are needed - whether this is promotion, hosting, colaborative tools or adminstrative support. TERENA already provides a home for many of the tools that the community uses, providing contractual arrangements, administration or infrastructure support for PEER, Confusa and Djangora to name just a few.

We'd like to look at how we are offering this support, how software projects can request support, and how we promote these software tools more generally to see if a more coordinated offering could be beneficial. At the moment this is just a discussion and requirements gathering process, but we'd love to hear your input and ideas. Initial discussion will draw on the open space session held at TNC2013. It is important to note that this is not currently a formal TERENA activity and no budget has been set for this work.

To sign-up to the list, please visit:

https://lists.geant.org/sympa/info/greenhouse

Why Greenhouse?

'Greenhouse' started out as a play on words as we didn't want to use the word 'conservancy' (conservancy - conservatory - greenhouse), as TERENA is not looking to provide the sort of features one might expect from a full software conservancy but something more lightweight. The word has stuck as it seems a good way of describing the intentions here - to provide the infrastructure for software projects to grow successfully within the community.

Greenhouse Plan

The following points are being investigated as part of the plan to identify a suitable implementation for the greenhouse:

(i) Needs assessment – to scope the Greenhouse concept, based on a documented list of requirements of different products (including those managed by the Amsterdam office as well as those led by NRENs that have expressed an interest in the Greenhouse idea).

(ii) Identify possible models (and the related risks) to implement the Greenhouse – to present a short list of possible approaches, including risks and benefits, that match the core requirements identified in (i)

(iii) Select the most suitable option – to agree on the approach to implement and develop a plan to execute it accordingly.

The full plan is detailed in the greenhouse plan.