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First Anniversary of the Open Geospatial Foundation
posted by Satri
on Monday February 12, @04:58PM
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from the first-but-so-many-great-years-to-come dept.
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from the first-but-so-many-great-years-to-come dept.
Tyler Mitchell, OSGeo's Executive Director, announced the rather quiet first year anniversary of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The interesting blog entry summarize what that year has been all about. From the entry's introduction: "February 4th, 2007 was the first anniversary of OSGeo. One year ago 25 people met face-to-face, and many more via phone and IRC, to discuss the possibility of starting an umbrella organisation. These participants represented over 13 different open source projects. The foundational purpose of the organisation was to help promote and continue to develop open source tools in the geospatial sphere. Since that time, much has happened and momentum around OSGeo continues to develop. Here are only a few highlights from that first year."
Related Stories
OSGeo Foundation to Provide a Geospatial Umbrella
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OSGeo Foundation writes "Press release: Open Source Geospatial Foundation Created to Strengthen Collaborative Development of Open Geospatial Technologies. OSGEO to provide an umbrella for community-led GIS and mapping projects. March 06, 2006 - The open source geospatial community today announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It will also serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit." Read more below for the whole press release.
OSGeo Celebrates Accomplishments at Six-Month Mark
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Open Source Geospatial Foundation writes "Seattle, Washington, USA, July 19 — The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) announced today that Mapbender, a portal-based suite of software for geodata management using OGC OWS architectures, has met all of the legal and community requirements to become the first official product supported by the Foundation. Just six months after its inception, the Foundation is already starting to make an impact on the geospatial industry, providing a degree of quality assurance for open source geospatial software users and getting its message out to the GIS community at conferences and tradeshows." Read below the rest of the PR.
OSGeo: What's Working and What's Not Working after 6 Months
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After a long and interesting discussion on the OSGeo mailing list, their wiki now partly summarize what's working and what's not working with the OSGeo after over 6 months of existence. Here's the first message of the long thread. From the not working side: "The main part of OSGeo that I think is not working as well as it could is communication. We have many mailing lists, which somewhat hide the real activity that is going on if you aren't following them every hour. There are committee conference calls as well. We also have a very active IRC channel which allows for awesome 1-on-1, real- time discussion, but it is also veiled somewhat from the public. Of course you can review IRC logs, follow many mailing lists and watch the wiki for changes, but we need some way to distill or amplify these great discussions in a manner that allows everyone to know, at a glance, what is going on. I have no real solution for this, but I'm sure we can hack something together."
OSGeo Journal
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Tyler Mitchell writes "The first volume of the OSGeo Journal has now been released. This is a major milestone for spreading the word about open source geospatial applications in general and for helping build communication between projects and users involved with the OSGeo Foundation. The Journal provides news, event summaries, project introductions, case studies, topical articles and more. Volume 2 is currently under development. For more information see http://www.osgeo.org/journal or download the 71 page (15MB) Journal directly from: http://www.osgeo.org/files/journal/final_pdfs/OSGe oJournal_vol1.pdf"
OSGeo Updates 1 comment
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The OSGeo blog shares updates on their blog, first topic is the financial and fundraising issues, then recent membership elections and membership management and finally a reminder on the OSGeo Journal and the upcoming FOSS4G conference. From the first link: "We've never had any real commitment to revenue targets - how many donors, how much from grants, who is responsible for doing it all, etc. - so it is hard to show that we have a plan for meeting our budget expenditures. Autodesk is still committed to helping fund the start-up of OSGeo in the short term but to be truly sustainable we must augment that with additional funds. [...] I have spoken to several members who have grant-writing experience and I believe we have some great opportunities out there - especially for developing educational material and developing/delivering workshops across many domains." See also related stories below.
OSGeo's Return on Equity
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The Open Source Geospatial Foundation discussion mailing list offered some great insights on the OSGeo and its return on equity. From the original message by Howard Butler: "Open source software works because people acting in their own self
interest have the auxiliary benefit of helping everyone in the
project. Report your pet bug, file a patch, add a new feature -- all
of these things immediately help you, but ultimately help the
project. This activity also imparts tangential benefits that are
very hard to quantify but can be clearly important like personal
visibility, credibility, and status. For an open source software project to be viable as a development
entity, it must be able to bestow these benefits to its individual
contributors. Everyone's reasons may be different, but people must
be able to receive a return on their sweat equity that they put in or
volunteer effort will not continue to flow into a project. I think
that recognition and facilitation of this symbiosis is a blind spot
for OSGeo. We should be striving to ensure that it can take place
because we are a volunteer organization whose members have common goals. [...] Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones." The whole thread is worth reading to understand the potential future of the OSGeo.
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First Anniversary of the Open Geospatial Foundation
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