This report highlights the steps involved in applying, incubating and graduating
software to become an OSGeo Project. The process is demonstrated with Mapbender, the
first project to successfully run through this process. Considerable positive effects
can be seen in the code base, project governance and the development team. Most of
the work that has been done can be retraced in the OSGeo Wiki, mailing lists and IRC,
this report recapitulates them in a concise presentation.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is common umbrella to very different software
projects. There are projects focusing on libraries, applications and front ends,
implemented in all kinds of languages and serving completely different developers and
users. Projects differ considerably in size, age, maturity, scope and governance. 

OSGeo has set out to create a procedure to evaluate any of these projects eventually
resulting in a comprehensive set of software packages that are ready to use, free of
legal encumbrances and of high quality from both a technical and governance point of
view.