Blogs

The end of May marked one year of analysed web site logs for the OSGeo.org web site. Here are just a few of the highlights showing the (monthly) traffic increases between May 2007 and May 2008.

• Unique visitors: 14,582 to 41,429
• Visits: 26,280 to 85,861
• Pages viewed: 124,574 to 397,534
• Hits: 784,545 to 1,186,885

I won't draw too many conclusions from these stats except to note that since Sept 2007 the number of unique visitors per month has almost exactly doubled (20,546 to 41,429).

You may also find it interesting to know the trends about who views our site. These are based on totals for the year 2007 and the year 2008 to date:

Browser used

• 2007 - Firefox (37%) vs Internet Explorer (53%)
• 2008 - Firefox (46%) vs Internet Explorer (39%)

Operating System

• 2007 - Windows (84%) vs Linux (8%)
• 2008 - windows (78%) vs Linux (12%)

The OSGeo.org server has been fairly static in terms of content, though events, news and language translations continue to be updated. So increases in traffic are mostly tied to increased visibility not just new content.

There are also separate stats available for the OSGeo download server, they were not included here. Over the past year more projects are now hosting or mirroring their project downloads on that site, so the trends are somewhat less meaningful.

Tyler Mitchell
3-June-2008

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to speak at the II Jornadas de SIG Libre (2nd meeting of the Free GIS Days) in Girona, Spain. It was hosted by University of Girona's Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing Service (SIGTE).

The event surpassed my expectations ...

OSGeo got some great publicity last month when I was recently interviewed by James Gray from the Linux Journal. It was great to meet him and to also learn about his interest in geospatial. If you poke around their web site, you will notice at least one other open source GIS article in the Linux Journal as well.

Tyler Mitchell
2-March-2008

This past week we had our Marketing and Finance Committee meetings, so I thought I'd share a few highlights.

Marketing

The Marketing Committee meets every couple of weeks to discuss a very wide range of activities and ideas. This recent meeting carried on some discussion from the last one and introduce a few other small ideas. The main task that is underway follows from this proposal to review and assess the various target audiences of OSGeo and develop a communication concept for meeting these goals. Also, the project will create/improve various branding items such as brochures, logos, etc. This project is currently underway and expected to wrap-up in about a month. The results of which will be re-usable for a wide variety of purposes, not least of which will be fundraising - e.g. having a good-looking brochure to share with potential sponsors.

Another item we discussed was that of creating a Marketing Budget for planning how funds will be spent in 2008. This is a requirement from the Finance Committee before spending 2008 funds. The Board's approved budget included $10,000 (plus $5 from last year) for Marketing related tasks. There is also another $10,000 put aside for Web Development promotional purposes.

Finance

At the September 23rd Board Meeting a Finance Committee was formed to deal with day-to-day and long-term financial management for the organisation. At that meeting we reviewed some flowcharts for setting management processes. We spent a lot time also reviewing some draft financial reports (that will feed into our 2007 Annual Report) and will make various improvements.

But perhaps the most exciting part of financial discussion is related to the FOSS4G 2007 event. There is now a conference report online which is very interesting - there is great feedback, some lessons learned as well as a snapshot of the financial picture.

On that note, it turned out to be highly successful financially as well as socially. Paul probably says it best: Thanks to a paid attendance that was 60% higher than expected, refunds from our A/V supplier (due to the wireless network and plenary issues) and lower than expected food costs, FOSS4G 2007 will return a surplus of just over $110,000CAD to OSGeo. Congratulations to Paul, Sea to Sky meeting management as well as all volunteers and supporters.

This year's event team is ramping up its work now too, having just released its Sponsorship Prospectus (2MB). If you are interested in sponsoring FOSS4G 2008 or have questions about exhibit space, etc. please contact this year's organisers at: foss4g2008@peoplesa.co.za

Annual Report

Meanwhile a few parts of the 2007 Annual Report are starting to come in. I've been in touch with many of you already, but if you have an aspect to contribute to the report, please be in touch, as I will be working on this a fair bit over the upcoming weeks. Note that the Annual Report will be published as part of the OSGeo Journal Volume 4, work on that will be starting soon as well.

Tyler Mitchell, 21-Jan-2008

Last month we announced the release of Volume 3 of the OSGeo Journal. This edition presents 14 papers from presenters at the FOSS4G 2007 conference. Now that the collecting, editing, typesetting and publishing is complete, I'm looking forward to a leisurely re-read of the material as a reader.

We are already starting to gather a sizable collection for Volume 4 which is targeted to be published by the end of March 2008. It will also serve as the publication of our 2007 Annual Report for OSGeo. You will be hearing more about this as I send out requests for input from the various projects and committees. I'm really looking forward to this next volume as it will be a very informative community document about our first full year of operations.

But before that volume is published, the Journal team will be re-grouping to look back on the first year of their efforts. I always considered this first year to be a Beta period to see how much work it would be, how many people would help and how much content is available to be published.

Since the first volume in May we've had more editors, reviewers and proof-readers come forward to offer their help.

The first year of the Journal saw many interesting articles and served various purposes: community news, announcements, project introductions, case studies and more. If there is an aspect of the Journal that you saw as particular useful or an area that you think it totally missed, please give us your feedback - both positive and constructively negative - by emailing me or using our feedback form. Looking forward to hearing any of your ideas.

Best wishes for 2008!

Tyler Mitchell
10-JAN-2008

This is a summary of a short talk I gave to the Mass Market Working Group
at the last meeting of the Technical Committee for the Open Geospatial Consortium. The OGC creates a set of free to use specifications which have become "open standards" for everyone in the software community, free and proprietary alike.

I was able to give this talk at all because of OGC's generous offer of
10 individual memberships to OSGeo members in an attempt to bring more
engagement from free and open source software projects into their
process of standards creation. However a request for an "Open Source
Perspective" on OGC and standards bodies at large is a tall order,
because the free and open source movement in geospatial software and
data is too copious and broad to talk about one "perspective".

Within free and open geospatial software in general, there is a wide spectrum of approaches to standards.
Near one end is the GeoAPI project, set up
specifically to stresstest via implementation, ISO and OGC standards
for geographic information modelling, figure out where the holes are
and attempt to fill them. Now the maintainers are looking to set up an
OGC Standards Working Group to formalise GeoAPI itself as a specification;
allowing the easier migration of components, common testing setups, etc.

Far along the spectrum is the open source / open data project OpenStreetmap,
which has taken a conscious decision to create interfaces independent
of "standards", by developer fiat or by the slow accretion of feedback
from members of the user community into an ever-evolving de facto
standard with no specification. For the project's founder, Steve Coast,
"Real artists ship. Everything else is standards-wanking."

The projects that form the OSGeo foundation are clustered at the
"standards-facing" end of the spectrum, having benefited a lot from
support for the OGC Web Services standards, particularly the Java
projects that have been involved in the OGC funded "testbeds" to create
reference implementations that become a kind of "gold standard".
In this sense, OSGeo is not the Mass Market that you are looking for,
but it can provide a bridge to it, especially through easy-to-use
web-facing client software packages such as OpenLayers.

I'm still trying to make sense of the OGC's "Mass Market" activity
as a continuous project. The efforts that have wound up inside it -
GeoRSS and KML being the popular successes - suggest some commonalities.
The Mass Market efforts seem to be driven by implementation - de facto
standards common in the wild, having a formal specification created for
them. They also seem to be somewhat self-standing relative to the main
core of OGC standardsm, which must (in theory) comply to its Abstract
Specification. The Mass Market specifications are correspondingly simple
- to understand and to implement, without the time/energy investment i
incurred by the full OGC and ISO abstractions.

So for efforts possessing these three qualities, OGC is offering a
different kind of process, through its Mass Market effort. This involves
access to drafts earlier on in the spec creation process and more
opportunity for public consultation (such as that going on right now
over the KML 2.2 spec and schueduled to end on Jan 4th 2008:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/45 )

More open inspection earlier into the process, incorporating feedback
from anyone in a position to give it, is a a behaviour that people
working on free and open source software take for granted.
More open inspection can only provide better strength in standards
and wider implementation.

One particular specification I've been asked to mention here is that
for tiling of map data delivered over the web. There have been arguably
three de facto standards common in free software for web map tiling,
efforts going back a year and a half at least. The implementors
responsible - particularly after a broadly attended meeting at the FOSS4G
2006 conference - have had no chance to participate, even in consultation,
in the WMTS efforts happening inside the OGC, which don't look much like
the existing free software prior art. For implementors this isn't
necessarily a problem - a piece of software like TileCache is willing to support
*any* XML-based standard for transferring tiles around, offering a common
software API for reassembling them, so one more in the mix isn't a problem -
(patches welcome) but it is troubling that there's been no means to fix or strengthen a specification that will become "industry standard" until so late in the process.
Treating efforts like WMTS as an OGC Mass Market project would help engage
the knowledge and energy available in free and open source "communities".

Our biggest problem is time. Although some people are supported by
corporate entities to work full or part time on open source software,
the majority of development activity is a byproduct of project and
consultancy work. What may be an issue of pressing relevance now,
will have been assigned to the back-burner in three weeks; if spare
developer time is available and it's not taken, it's likely wasted.
Within the OSGeo foundation many people are donating their time *because*
they're already donating their time to other projects; while the
commercial benefits of being directly involved in the specification
development process are *no less*, people in GFOSS are much less likely
to be able to afford the time investment upfront, that people who
are supported specifically to be in the standards process for business
and/or governance reasons. More information, earlier, is the core answer.

Other "open issues" that I've heard raised amongst FOSS4G developers
are really to do with *very* simple problems, perhaps so much so
that they fall below the radar of standards-body participants.
>From software projects and infrastructure designers I've heard
pleas for some common way - using a URL or URN scheme - to refer
to different kinds of, and versions of, web services for delivering
geographic information, that isn't specific to OGC and can be easily
extended. Everyone winds up using their own custom scheme, there's
no simple common mapping. OGC has a URN standard for identifying
web services, which other efforts built on, but it doesn't extend
to describe KML, or ESRI-specific, or other interfaces.

Another issue is a similar one, common schemes for referring to
and describing coordinate reference systems and projections,
which extend further than the well-used EPSG codes, which are by no
means copious. I was surprised to hear excitement about the development
of common libraries and descriptions for CRS/SRS specifications at
the last FOSS4G - it seems like something so fundamental to all the
work with geographic data that we are doing! If the OGC is in a
position to address and fix these simple issues, it would be doing
a great service to everyone working with geospatial software and data.

As OGC participants have seen over the years, getting their standards
embedded in free and open source software encourages "acceptance",
helps partial specifications to harden and mature, and promotes
widespread adoption. Increased engagement, given the right balance of
time/money/energy, can only be a good thing.

The OSGeo board has recently started talking about putting together an Annual Report for 2007 - our first full year of operations. I had hoped to make some headway on this before FOSS4G but the timing didn't work out.

In the meantime, we haven't gone totally without any reports, though maybe they are not advertised well enough. I'll mention a few of them here in case you are not already familiar with them and would like to keep updated.

This year's Annual General Meeting at FOSS4G was a great success. It was our first attempt to bring together reports from the board, projects, local chapters and committees - all describing what they have done over the past year or are planning for the future. The kinds of content presented at that meeting would be similar to what feeds into an Annual Report, though instead of requesting written reports I asked representatives to speak face-to-face with the membership. We had over 25 speakers/topics presented at that meeting!

Another deliberate way we foster communication has been through the OSGeo Journal - including reports from projects, local chapters and more. These first two issues were a bit of an experiment to see how regularly we could get reports from parts of our community without pestering them too much. When we started the Journal the hope was to use it as an outlet for producing reports on a regular basis. It has worked out well so far, but has been a lot of work. If you are interested in encouraging more dialogue in this semi-formal way, you are welcome to join the Journal team as an editor. This is the benefit of a volunteer organisation, everyone is welcome to participate to make things happen :)

My OSGeo Blog is also used to provide reports to the community, sponsors and the public. Though not as regular as they could be, I've tried to pull together short reports with critical information on important occasions. This included a year in review post summarising some highlights from our first year, as well as various other stats. I encourage other OSGeo members to blog about their own OSGeo work/involvement, all of which would be helpful for feeding into an Annual Report.

We also have lots of discussion on the OSGeo discussion mailing list and throughout project lists, the board of directors and more. Naturally this the key way we communicate within OSGeo and everyone is welcome to participate.

One key development over the past few months has been the establishment of an OSGeo Finance Committee. This 5 person group will help facilitate financial decisions, planning and reporting without relying solely on the Treasurer or having to always defer final decisions back the Board. This will certainly help on several fronts, as we have recently just passed our first full year of having funds to manage and report on.

So, as several of us ponder how to pull together the information needed for a more formal Annual Report, I hope you will also consider how you might help to make it happen. It will take a major amount of input and coordination to get it right but it will help build on these other communication efforts over the past year.

Consider this your invitation to help!

Tyler Mitchell
23-Nov-2007

I feel as if I've been in orbit for the last week, flying high above the Earth, floating through a sea of ideas and latent energy. Metaphors aside, the FOSS4G event has left me both overwhelmed with admiration and bubbling with enthusiasm.

The most powerful memories I am taking away from the event are about conversations with other attendees. I greatly admire the many people I met and the various ideas and philosophies they presented -- these will surely echo in my mind and in our community consciousness for a long time to come.

Overview

For me, the week started with one of the most productive board meetings we've had in a long time. The OSGeo Board of Directors doesn't get to meet face to face very often, but sure took advantage of it last Sunday. There was fruitful discussion about promotional priorities, financial management initiatives, a rough budget was sketched out for 2008, and more. It was also a good time to welcome our three new board members Bob Bray, Jeroen Ticheler and Paul Ramsey.

On Monday, Jeff McKenna and I led an intro to MapServer workshop. We missed our usual co-presenter Perry, but it still went over fine. I didn't get to see any of the other workshops or labs, but heard they were all packed full and very productive. Attendees will, no doubt, provide the usual feedback asking for more or larger workshop spaces. It seems our attendees are always hungry for more hands-on workshops. Perhaps local chapters can consider how to address some of those needs.

That evening we held the first ever OSGeo Annual General Meeting. Over 200 people attended to hear Local Chapter updates, software project updates and committee reports. It was a fast-paced presentation format that helped us to meet each other and to learn about activities and the people behind them. Thank you to all the presenters who participated in the meeting - it was a great success.

The OSGeo booth got underway on Tuesday. Our space was large and quite open, and always filled with people. We had lots of brochures, advertisements and other material to hand out; it was all gone by the end of the week. As usual, I came away with specific ideas for improving our presence at these kinds of events. And, as usual, they were the same ideas -- we need to revamp our brochures and get some professional print quality design as well as prepare some animated self-running demos of our software. The excellent GeoNetwork brochures are a good example of the kinds of product we could use. Thank you very much for those who stayed around the booth answering questions. A special thanks to Mateusz who camped out there for most of the week.

During my time in the booth I spoke with dozens of people from several countries and projects. The overwhelming questions were from groups or individuals who have an open source project, or who want to turn a project into open source, and want to know where to begin. This ties into the recent Discuss list thread about supporting small/start-up projects. People wanted to know how they could get the word out about their project and/or how to get it under the OSGeo umbrella.

The closing plenary session was interesting, with Adena helping to provide a review/summary of her observations at the event. There was also an eclectic group of people on the closing panel that helped to stir up some further thinking and discussion. Perhaps the most memorable part of the panel discussion was Tim Bowden elegantly describing that GIS is dead, as it becomes increasingly consumed by I.T. in general.

It is a tradition to give the Sol Katz Award to recognise a member of the open source geospatial commnunity. This year's award was given to Steve Lime, the father of the MapServer project. So many of us were introduced to open source through the MapServer that the award is more than well deserved. Congratulations Steve!

Summary

The whole week feels like a bit of a blur. I'm sure it was the same for many attendees who wanted to see more presentations than was humanly possible, or who wanted to keep talking with colleagues until the wee morning hours. I don't think I was alone for more than 5 hours the whole week, whether it was chatting at the booth, talking over dinner or debating with my roommates. During all these discussions about projects, events, promotional ideas and more, a couple recurring themes popped up. Here are just two of them:

Collaboration -- Projects and people seem more willing to work together than ever before. While this has always been a cornerstone of OSGeo projects, the momentum continues to build. There was a lot of discussion about projects that could potentially work closer together, share code, etc. Similarly, local chapters will continue to develop as people in common areas or languages work together to promote our projects.

Cartography -- Not too long ago cartography used to refer to printed maps, which many recognise as a weak area in open source. This is a continual discussion point for our communities: how to produce high-quality printed maps. Fortunately we have a lot of expertise on this topic within our communities. Last week I spoke to several people about filling this need by having a separate project focused on the problem. There was general agreement that a project built on standards like SLD and other XML data/configuration items could really help us focus. The main benefit being that other projects could output to this engine instead of each writing their own. I'll write more about this in the near future.

Thanks, thanks and more thanks

My talk on Thursday was about OSGeo as a "Community of Communities". You've probably heard this before, but it was never so obvious then when at FOSS4G. 700 people speaking many different languages, from dozens of countries, using or representing dozens of projects -- all contributed to the sense that you were at a global technology bazaar. As others have noted, this wasn't just a great OSGeo event, or even just a great geospatial event. It was just a great conference. Period.

Thanks to Paul Ramsey for taking the lead to deliver such a high-quality energy packed event. Thanks to the conference sponsors for helping make it happen. Thanks to all the attendees for participating to make it a most memorable week for all who attended.

Like a freight-train on a roller coaster track, FOSS4G is swinging by to pick up its ~700 registered attendees this weekend. Next week is packed full of exciting meetings and opportunities to learn more about open source geospatial software and its users. I may have bitten off more than I can chew for tasks at the event, but I just couldn't resist trying to squeeze every drop of value out of it. Here are some of the things to watch out for and, generally, where you'll find me during the week.

MapServer 101 Workshop

For a fourth year in a row, Jeff McKenna, Perry Nacionales (in absentia) and I will will put on our annual, sold out, introductory MapServer workshop. This year is the biggest crowd ever, over 80 pupils and likely no standing room for lurkers. If you are coming to it, feel free to introduce yourself by dropping me a note and tell us anything in particular you hope to get out of the workshop.

As an aside, a couple years ago we pulled together a MapServer Reference Guide for Vector Data Formats, specifically as a resource for pupils at this workshop. You can browse a copy here or download a PDF here.

OSGeo Annual General Meeting

This year we are hosting a more official get-together for OSGeo members and the broader community. On Monday evening, after the workshops at FOSS4G, there will be a 90 minute meeting including many reports updating you on the activities of OSGeo. You'll hear from our President, Frank Warmerdam, along with more than a dozen other project leaders and local chapter organisers. I hope you will join us for this informal meeting, especially if you are new to the OSGeo or want to meet many others face-to-face.

OSGeo Booth

During the FOSS4G exhibition OSGeo will have an exhibit booth area for users, members, sponsors and others to come and meet each other. Come to our booth in the centre of the exhibition hall to pick up propaganda, meet others and chat, or use the Internet Cafe to check your webmail to see what's up all your OSGeo mailing lists ;-). If you have a program, product or web site that shows off integration of open source apps, feel free to stop by and help promote the software by demonstrating it to others at the booth.

As usual, I will be at the booth, but can always use more help. If you have an hour or two to spare, stop by, say hello, and tell me to take five. I'll also have a video recorder handy for taking some impromptu interviews or news from the floor. No promises, but I hope to get some sort of streaming video online from the booth. You never know, you might even get some from a couple of the presentations... Watch here for more information.

Birds of a Feather Meetings

As usual, the BoF meetings are a hot topic leading up to the event. We have many people organising meet-ups - from casual "let's get together and chat about an idea" to "let's plan out the next year's plan of attack for X project"... it's a wide range of goals and concepts.

Keep your eyes posted during the registration desks for any last minute changes to the BoF schedule or room assignments, or to post your own! Try to keep the wiki page up to date as well. Warning - time is tight and rooms are too. Planning for a meet-up in a pub may end up being your best alternative if things get full.

Lots More....

Of course there are many great presentations, workshops and labs planned for the week as well. There is also the Code Sprint, Integration Demonstrations and much, much more.

Watch for press releases and announcements that are sure to pop up during the event.

Photos

If you are going to be at the event and have a camera (or your are at home lamenting the fact you are at home) tune into Flickr and tag your photos with "foss4g2007" - here they are so far. There is also a FOSS4G2007 Flickr Group.

I'm looking forward to meeting some new faces and seeing many of you face-to-face. Don't hesitate to drop by the booth or nudge me in the hallway if you want to chat.

Best wishes for you and your week,
Tyler

I just compiled a quick list showing the numbers of subscribers to each of the OSGeo hosted mailing lists. I found the results quite interesting and now want to dig into the stats from projects that have externally hosted mailing lists.

Here were the top ten in terms of number of subscribers:

List	Subscribers
ANNOUNCE	630
MAPGUIDE-USERS	560
DISCUSS	537
MAPBENDER_USERS	258
AFRICA	151
MAPGUIDE-ANNOUNCE	143
SPANISH	137
MAPGUIDE-INTERNALS	136
WEBMAP-DISCUSS	102
OTTAWA_USERS	99

That's over 2,700 subscribers on 10 lists. Over all the lists there are over 4,000 subscribers. Of course there is some overlap between the people who are registered, but I still personally found it interesting.

But the big question... who will be the 100th Ottawa Local Chapter subscriber? ;-)