[ITK-users] Migration to GitHub

[Matt McCormick]

Hi folks,

We are considering migration of ITK's software process to GitHub, and
we would like your feedback.

As an open-source, community-driven project, mechanisms to communicate
and interact with the community are a high priority for ITK.
Contributing should be as easy as possible. Increasingly over the past
many years, GitHub has become the de facto place to interact for open
source development. It is now a hub for:

  Microsoft
  Facebook
  Google
  The Scientific Python Community
  The 3D Slicer Community

Our InsightSoftwareConsortium GitHub organization [1] already has 67
people in it and 74 repositories. There are hundreds of projects that
depend on ITK on GitHub. Many ITK developers are familiar with the
development process on GitHub (i.e the pull request process) and
already have an account on this platform. There are also advantages to
linking issues and commits with other projects and repositories. Since
ITK thrives on the open-source development idea, everyone who wants to
help the project should be able to contribute, and therefore it should
be as easy as possible to start participating in the community.

Recently, GitHub's code review capabilities have greatly improved,
which make it more feasible to coordinate contributions for a large
project like ITK. And, there are many existing GitHub-integrated
services that we can leverage.

Thanks to resources from the National Library of Medicine and
technological advances, it is now feasible to migrate the project's
software process to GitHub. There are many infrastructural aspects to
the migration, and it would take multiple months to complete. Please
let us know your thoughts before we embark on the journey.


[1] https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium