Hi David,
A few specific responses:
I have told many clients that Omeka showed great promise, but to hold on because while it is a project housed at a University where youthful enthusiasm and energy can be fantastic, students move on. Especially in a grant type atmosphere where things start to dry up, or people find they need to replace enthusiasm with job reality.
Omeka has received funding for several more years, with plenty of more work in the pipeline. For starters, we have an IMLS grant to create an Omeka Commons, which will help Omeka users with medium-term preservation and dissemination. You may have missed our blog post about this a few months ago. This is work we're only beginning on, and will continue for the next few years.
Most of our work over the last year has been to get the Omeka.net hosted service ready for public consumption, and that has met with, in my opinion, great success and positive feedback. All of that work feeds back into the open-source software product itself.
Granted, we are more behind with the 1.3 release than expected. Our release dates are estimates, and can change depending on what we need to put into the next release. However, we are working to release 1.3 before the end of this semester, and plan to do regular point releases every 4-6 months, depending on features included and bugs to be fixed.
This is the first asset manager that I have seen in the open source community that actually had promise.
Not only do I still think it has promise for the future, I think we have fulfilled many promises, and have worked diligently to provide our users with a solid, flexible software product. We've had numerous tagged releases of Omeka since beginning the project, and plan to have many more.
But is it becoming a victim of grant-to-mouth existence? Having one person answer queries for several months is a death knell if you ask me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "grant-to-mouth existance", but I think if you browse the forums and developer listserv, you will see far more than "one person answer queries for several months." The Omeka user community, while admittedly smaller than larger CMS projects, is nevertheless very active in my opinion. The Omeka team has a couple of staff members who devote a specific portion of their work week just to answer forum posts. Far from indicating a "death knell," this to me speaks about how much we care about helping Omeka users and how we work to sustain the project, that we have regular staff who specifically respond on the forums.
Another forum thread, "Omeka Future", also briefly addresses future development.
If none of what I've just said convinces you, you may want to check out the Omeka Trac. Here you're free to review our current list of tickets and code commits with messages. If you look at the commits, you'll see we've been working quite a lot on Omeka. We have plenty of tickets too, and those include features for 1.x releases and an eventual 2.0 release.
With all this said, we have lots of work left to do, but Omeka is not at all stalled. We're committed to the project, and plan to sustain it going forward, thanks in no small part to the many institutional and individual users who use it, and the funders who help support it.
Best,
Jeremy