TylerMitchell's blog

FOSS4G 2010 call for abstracts is now open! As usual, there will be a flood of awesome abstracts and ideas to be chosen from. Make sure a presentation proposal for your favourite project or case study gets in by the deadline, so you have your excuse to goto Barcelona :)

http://www.osgeo.org/foss4g/2010/call_for_abstracts

I just read about a recent Freenode fundraiser and thought you might be interested in supporting their work. OSGeo and members projects rely pretty heavily on their IRC network for a variety of real-time discussion needs. Their funding goals are quite small, so even a tiny donation will go a long way.

Donate now and get a free shirt :)

http://freenode.net/pdpc_seven.shtml

February 16-19th there will be the Mil-OSS, military open source software focused event in Portland. I'm not sure I'll be able to make it this time around but I'm sure some fellow OSGeo Oregonians might be interested.

Note this is considered a working group meeting and therefore includes serious discussion about problems and solutions as opposed to sales pitches and business perspectives. For example, last years event had a "shorts and sandals, but no ties" dress code approach which was disarming and helped facilitate engaging discussion.

From a geospatial angle, it's always a great event for catching up with the OSSIM project and the Optiks image processing/remote sensing developers.

Door is open for speaker requests: http://www.mil-oss.org/speaker_form.htm

I'll be speaking at the huge AGU event this week for the first time. Other OSGeo members will be there as well. If you are around on Friday, or even nearby (downtown San Francisco) please don't hesitate to give me a buzz to meetup. If you stop by my talk on building an open source toolkit, please be sure to say hi afterwards.

City of Vancouver has started their Beta catalogue with a handful of layers and types avaialable. Earlier in the year they increased their commitment to open data and also to consider open source solutions - so it should be an interesting year ahead.

Thanks to Rick from our OSGeo British Columbia chapter for pointing it out.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending one day of GeoWeb - always a great place to connect with several OSGeo members and also to introduce OSGeo to potential new ones. The night before we held a meeting of our provincial OSGeo-BC chapter and had a record turnout of almost 30 people! I met many new people who are already avid open source users and am following up with several to get case studies about their work.

Next week I deliver a talk at the Mil-OSS event in Atlanta. As many know, acquiring open source software in government doesn't have a reputation of being easy. Working group meetings like this have helped to raise the profile, importance and viability of OSS in various sectors within the US government. We have enough talks to even have a geospatial stream.

Later in the week I'll be at WhereCamp5280 in Denver. I'm looking forward to catching up with many different attendees and hearing their thoughts, stories and ideas.

If you are going to be at either of these events and would like to meet please don't hesitate to drop me a note (tmitchell at osgeo.org).

Starting earlier today one of our servers had some trouble and this is affecting a few different project websites. Some projects are switching their DNS over to using a temporary site in the meantime. www.osgeo.org and wiki.osgeo.org are all up and running but several others (e.g. qgis.osgeo.org, GRASS, etc.) are affected.

Announcements, News

Just a reminder to everyone that may have newsworthy items to share, we have a process available that posts news items to our www.osgeo.org website, into a news RSS feed and gets sent to our announcement only email list (~1000 subscribers).

For instructions on posting news items, please see:

• http://www.osgeo.org/content/news/submit_news.html

If in doubt about the applicability of your announcement, send it anyway and ask for an opinion.

OSGeo Service Provider Directory

This is also a reminder to Service Providers, those who provide service (commercial or otherwise) for open source geospatial applications, that we have a directory available for your organisation to be highlighted in. With over 140 entries so far, the directory covers 30 countries, over 20 languages and 23 different software projects.

• Search the directory: http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile
• Add your own entry: http://www.osgeo.org/spd_help

I look forward to hearing more about your news and seeing your group listed in our directory!

Tyler Mitchell
Executive Director, OSGeo

Approximately 49 authors, 57 articles, 24,000 words later we have a comprehensive report of OSGeo activities around the world:

• http://www.osgeo.org/annual_report_2008

Thank you for the writers and sponsors who helped make this possible.

Enjoy!

I've just got back from a trip to the UK and Italy last week for the OSGIS event and the OSGeo Hacking Event. It was a great time of connecting with so many people that it exceeded my expectations.

Before heading up to Nottingham I was able to meet up with Martin Daly from Cadcorp (a GDAL/OGR sponsor) in London. We hadn't met face to face before, so I was glad to get a firsthand chance to see their SIS GIS Desktop product in action. Our very own Mateusz also works there so it was treat to catch up with him as well. Of course he couldn't resist going to Nottingham too and overworking his camera - his flickr feed is always helpful after an event :)

From the word go, Suchith Anand, Mike Jackson and the rest of the University of Nottingham's Centre for Geospatial Science crew had us hopping. I didn't realise it was possible to pack so much into a single day event! Thank you for the opportunity to deliver a keynote there and for lining up so many good speakers and people to meet with the following day as well. Three cheers! I'm sure next year will be even better.

It was a truly international event with close to 20 different countries represented. It was really good to catch up with many of you from all over Europe, I'll be going through my notes this week, but still feel free to drop me if you remember anything in particular we should pursue together.

One recurring theme of interest from several groups and and individuals, was the interest to partner with OSGeo to write case studies relating to their domain. I'm really looking forward to following up on these. If you want to help write, please let me know.

The OSGeo UK Chapter held a meeting as well, with Jo Cook leading the charge. It's always fascinating to see how different each chapter is - each with their own interests, strengths and local challenges. This was only the second time they met...sort of. Last year there were less than a dozen who met up to discuss the idea of forming a chapter. This year it was more like 50 or more people with broad interest from around the UK. Coming from a Canadian, it might seem strange to say that the UK chapter is spread out over large distances, but it is large enough that some more regional local groups are likely to pop up. There were contingents from Scotland and Wales talking about meeting and I know there are some Irish interested as well.

They have high hopes, so if you are the UK, join their list and find a good reason to get together and chat.

(Photos from mlsoskot's photostream under under these terms - good job Mateusz!)