Slashgeo

Claude Philipona writes "Free and Open Source Geospatial Communities Joint Conference '06 - FOSS4G2006 is a four day conference, bringing together all the Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G) communities. The conference incorporates the OSGIS Conference, Mapserver User Meeting, GRASS Users Conference, Java oriented FOSS4G and EOGEO Workshops. Lausanne, Switzerland will host the conference, making it the first time many of these groups will meet in Europe. With the recent creation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, FOSS4G2006 will be an exciting opportunity to network with foundation members and projects." More below.

Seven writes "From MapbenderWiki: The Mapbender Project is happy to announce the new release 2.4.3 with some minor changes and all bug fixes since the last version. Change in Release Management: More importantly this is the first release that comes in a regular time cycle and not after a certain set of features have been added. This change in policy has been discussed at length on the Mapbender mailing list and on IRC. It reflects a further maturation of the software and aims at making regular updates to the newest version a lesser issue for users and portal operators. The next release with major changes is due in December 2007, the challenge being whether the Project will keep up with the goal of regular release cycles. Full Adoption of Trac: After more than a half year of testing, discussion and trial phase all enhancements and bug fixes are now managed via the OSGeo operated Trac instance. Trac is now also used to manage road map and further development. Keep it Human(e and) Readable: The human readable version continues to be available through the Wiki as a MediaWiki template page that ties into the full Version History of Mapbender. Online Training Course: In time for FOSS4G 2007 a full fledged Online Training Course (Mapbender 101) is made available through OSGeo's Education infrastructure Moodle (currently still on the OSGeo Test Server. It will receive its baptism of fire (editors: feel free to amend to something less pompous...) during the FOSS4G Mapbender Workshop. "

Cameron Shorter writes "The international conference for free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), held in Sydney, Australia 20-23 October, 2009, is now open for registration. http://2009.foss4g.org/registration/ FOSS4G attracts the cream of international Geospatial Open Source and Open Standards system implementors and sponsors. With themes ranging from the integration of Open Source with Proprietary systems to the building of Spatial Data Infrastructures and application of Open Geospatial Standards, the conference offers a unique opportunity to tap into the wealth of knowledge and experience available among the Open Source developers, sponsors and geospatial professionals of all persuasions. The Open Geospatial Consotium (OGC) is underpinning the conference with a Standards Based integration showcase based on a climate change scenario, demonstrating integration between Open Source and proprietary applications. ... more" See also related FOSS4G stories below.

Cameron Shorter writes "Over 10,000 unique email addresses are subscribed to email lists from OSGeo and supported projects. more ..." From the link: "These figures are very useful when making a business case for sponsoring OSGeo or FOSS4G, so I'm hoping some resourceful geek will work out a way to extra these figures every month so we can track the growth of OSGeo from this point on. [...] It is not surprising that 46% of FOSS4G2007 delegates heard about FOSS4G from a collegue or email. With 10,000 evangelists, OSGeo provides powerful viral marketing." We have OSGeo and open source community sections - this is two topics that you can be sure to hear very often on Slashgeo. Some previous related stories copied below.

mapbutcher writes "Sydney, Australia. 15 June 2009. You can now vote on the papers you'd like to see at FOSS4G 2009! We have had over 170 abstract submissions. Have your say on what you would like to see at the conference. You can read the abstracts and cast your votes for your preferred papers. Voting is open now and will close on Sunday 28th June. To vote follow the link here: http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations/ For instructions on how to vote, please refer to the voting page on the Conference website or http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Program#Presentation_Voting Successful authors will be notified on the 20th of July. A preliminary program will be in place by August.

Upcoming FOSS4G milestones

• 15-28 June 2009, Abstract Voting is Open
• 31 Jul 2009, Early registration deadline
• 14 Sep 2009, Completed program available
• 20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
• 21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
• 24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

[...]" See also related stories below.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), which gets a lot of coverage on Slashgeo, just released their OSGeo Annual Report 2008. It's a 57 pages pdf with its main contents being: "# Executive Reports: Editorial, news items, financial statement # Committee Reports: Education and Curriculum, Public Geospatial Data, Incubation, Journal, Marketing, Website # Software Project Reports: deegree, FDO, GeoNetwork opensource, GEOS, GeoTools, GRASS GIS, gvSIG, Mapbender, Mapbuilder, MapGuide Open Source, MapServer, OpenLayers, OSSIM, Quantum GIS and Google Summer of Code # Local Chapter Reports: Africa, Australia/New Zealand, British Columbia, California, Cascadia, China, Finland, Francophone, German, Greek, India, Italian, Japan, Korean, New Mexico, Ottawa, Poland, Quebec, Romania, Spanish, Twin Cities, United Kingdom" See the previous related stories below, including one mentioning the OSGeo being now over than 10,000 people strong.

Cameron Shorter writes "Early Bird Registration for the Free and Open Source Software conference for GeoSpatial (FOSS4G) closes this Friday, 7 August 2009. FOSS4G abstracts and workshops are presented by the world's best Developers, Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals include the latest geospatial applications, standards, government programs, business processes and case studies. Topics include mobile platforms, location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing, development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services, Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more. Also announced is the OGC's call for participation in a Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest to be launched at FOSS4G." See also related stories copied below.

Cameron Shorter writes "The FOSS4G conference is famous for its community driven, extra-curricular activities and wiki pages are now open for community members to define these activities for 2009. So if you want to get more out of FOSS4G than just listening, if you have a topic you want to discuss, a message you want to share, a product you want to show off or you want to network with like minded people, then please consider adding your name to one of the activities. Full details here." See previous FOSS4G 2009 stories below.

Cameron Shorter writes "Yves Jacolin has sliced FOSS4G website hits to determine the number of FOSS4G attendees per million people, broken down by country. From this, you can get a feeling for the most OSGeo tolerant populations in the world (distorted around Australia due to the conference location). So what can we learn?

• Japan and Mongolia are the place be in Asia
• Chile is the place to be in Latin America
• Canada looks preferable to the US. I wonder how much the Canadian GeoConnections program is responsible for Canada's strong OSGeo industry.
• There is a lot of interest across Europe, so FOSS4G 2010 should be a crowded event.
• Africa seems to have learned all they need to know when FOSS4G attended Cape Town last year, and won't be heading to Australia in force.

See the maps here." Some related stories copied below.

Tyler Mitchell writes "FOSS4G 2006 Conference — A Great Success. 5 October 2006. The energy and enthusiasm of the Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G) Conference continues to grow. This year over 500 attendees made their way to Lausanne, Switzerland from September 12-15th to participate in this annual international event. The conference began with a day and a half of more than 25 hands-on workshops. They covered web mapping, desktop applications, 3D visualization, and much more. As in years past, these workshops were completely sold-out due to their popularity." Read more below for the rest of the press release.

The FOSS4G 2007, the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial 2007 conference, has been in preparation for some time already. This year, it will be held in Victoria (BC) Canada. Paul Ramsey announced the Workshops and Labs program are now established. This conference is increasingly important in the geospatial community. The call for presentations ends in late June. From the main site: "The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference brings together the people who create, use, and support open spatial software. No other event brings together members of the open source development, open data creation, and open standards promotion communities like FOSS4G. Find out more about FOSS4G." See this entry on the future of GITA vs FOSS4G conferences. See also related stories below for FOSS4G 2006 items.

Directions Magazine has an interesting interview with Paul Ramsey of Refractions Research and Tyler Mitchell of OSGeo on the upcoming Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, British Columbia. In addition to some of the highlights coming at FOSS4G, they provide an overview of some general trends in the development and adoption of open source geospatial technologies.

Safe Software writes "Safe Software to Demonstrate Technology for Data Exchange between Proprietary and Open Source Platforms at FOSS4G Excerpt from press release: Safe Software, the recognized leader in providing spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) tools for translating and transforming spatial data, today announced that the company is sponsoring and presenting at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, BC, from September 24-27. Conference attendees will have several opportunities to learn how the company's FME platform can play an important role in improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of geospatial systems by serving as a bridge for exchanging data between open source and proprietary software. For more details, visit www.safe.com."

From the morning plenary sessions of FOSS4G2007: Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology for Autodesk announced that it will donate its coordinate system and map projection technology. From the official NR: "The software, acquired from Mentor Software and its founder Norm Olsen, will help users to more easily support geographic coordinate conversions and allow accurate and precise geospatial analysis. The announcement was made today at the annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where geospatial open source developers and users join to learn, present and network."

Still recovering from my recent accident I was not able to provide a timely coverage of last week's Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics (FOSS4G) 2007 conference in Victoria. With open source geospatial software being widely used nowadays, even by behemoths such as Google, Autodesk and ESRI, this conference is doubtlessly important. Here's a wrap up of the most interesting entries on the event that I could find, see also the previous related stories below. Let's start with the official program and OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell and Autodesk's Geoff Zeiss preemptive notes. If you have only time for one wrap up to read, here's Peter Batty's extensive review of FOSS4G 2007. From this entry: "The quality of the sessions I went to was consistently high, and there was a real energy and buzz around the whole event (much more than at most of the more established geospatial conferences I have been to recently). Adena Schutzberg said in her closing comments that her overall impression of the conference and the open source geospatial community was one of maturity [...]. The event reaffirmed the belief I had before coming here that the role of open source software in the geospatial industry will continue to grow quickly." All Points Blog offers an excellent coverage of the whole event, here's their entries: on the opening/lightning talks, tidbits I, tidbits II and exhibit highlights. Other entries include GeoServer news and tutorials, a short entry on an OpenLayers talk, Autodesk's announcement of code donation (covered last week), Andrew Turner's Beyond GPS slides, Archaeogeek one, two and three interesting accounts of the event. Update: 10/03 19:24 GMT by S : OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell just provided it's own overview of FOSS4G's success.

The FOSS4G2008 Conference will be held from September 29, 2008 through October 3, 2008 in Cape Town, South Africa.

From the FOSS4G2008 Home Page: "The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference brings together the people who create, use, and support open spatial software. No other event brings together members of the open source development, open data creation, and open standards promotion communities like FOSS4G.

The 2008 FOSS4G Conference will be held in the fascinating and beautiful city of Cape Town , South Africa from the Monday 29th September to Friday 3rd October at the Cape Town International Convention Centre"

Foss4G2008 Home Page

Thanks to Directions Magazine who shares an Internet roundup of the FOSS4G event. There was surprisingly little geoblog coverage this year. From the OPP blog entry quoted in DM summary: "The result is a strange cultural mix. The FOSS crowd [is] lively, reliably laughing and applauding when a speaker makes a dig at proprietary software (PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Apple). Their speeches are deliberately humorous and irreverent. After Ed Parsons gave a rather cluelessly untargeted talk about how Google's (proprietary) products are awesome and how easy it is for people to use them to make (proprietary) data, the crowd dragged him over the coals during the Q&A. The government and GIS groups must find this strange. Their tone was consistently more serious, more cautious, and less confrontational. The pace of their presentations was slower. They presented their tragic facts and their strategies to overcome them without the exuberance and confidence that this was their time to rally." You can read Ed Parsons reply here. You can read Paul Ramsey's entry on his Sol Katz Award.

Cameron Shorter writes "Many FOSS4G workshops are close to full, with one workshop already at capacity. People wanting to learn about Geospatial Standards, Geospatial Open Source Software and Business Cases should sign up soon to avoid disappointment. FOSS4G is the international Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference, which comes to Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October 2009. FOSS4G offers presentations, workshops, demos, an install-fest, and a code sprint. It is presented by the world's best Developers, Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals and includes the latest geospatial applications, standards, government programs, business processes and case studies. Topics include mobile platforms, location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing, development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services, Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more." See previous FOSS4G stories below.

I'm happy to report a Slashgeo.org representative, actually myself this time, will attend to FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney in three weeks. We'll be able to provide first hand reports from the conference. We should publish the usual wrap-ups and anyone can share their own highlights. Also new is a FOSS4G topic on Slashgeo - where you'll find our previous FOSS4G coverage, starting back in 2006.