Open Source Geospatial Foundation

I arrived late to the meeting, after a brief chat with Jeff from DM solutions (thanks Jeff). And was very happy to see broad base of projects represented, and community in attendance via IRC. In general I use this blog to talk about Java hacking, spatial stuff, and tend to keep industry or open source commentary down to a dull roar. I should learn, industry and open source commentary are my only postings that get much in the way of hits ;-)

First of all a bit of context, so I don't have to repeat themselves:

• Introducing ... the Open Source Geospatial Foundation - mapping hacks (aka 
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation - import cartography (aka Sean)
• First thoughts on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation - PerryGeo (aka Matt)
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation Meeting - Review - Spatial Galaxy (aka Gary)
• And of course the IRC logs (this is open development after all)

There are a couple points I want to address:

• Java Representation
• Scale of OSGEO
• Community

Java Representation

A couple points that were raised, were based around the theme of Java representation in the open source spatial scene. The Java Spatial community does keep in contact (Hi Deegree we miss you), and do have collaborative/outreach projects in in place (cough GeoAPI) and GeoTools.

And the GeoTools community is very serious about being represented in this foundation - the IRC meeting will be today at 11am PST on freenode#geotools.

Finally all of our representatives at Saturdays meeting were nominated for the intern board. A big thanks to Chris Holmes (and indeed all the interim board) for taking on these roles, no pressure.

In short the Java community has a history of co-operating, we are interested in the foundation (email thread is collection +1 votes now), and we are represented on the interm board.

I do expect some projects to hold back, but you have us where it counts - where we collaborate. Which brings a question - would projects "Powered by GeoTools" get a "Built on OSGEO" sticker as well? Heck we could have a lot of fun with those stickers: "OSGEO - Think way outside the box", or "OSGEO:  It's a Spheroid get over it". Okay I will stop before you stop reading...

The other way to view this concern is - can we cooperate with those of the C++ bent?

This is where open standards comes to play, it is front and center part of the OSGEO swath of construction. And we are pretty good, and getting better on all sides. Now if GeoNetwork will just gain some (more) momentum ...  This is the only point where we hoped a foundation would be able to help. Not all standards (cough ISO) are open, and yet they still show up referenced in other standards. A solution to this is something we all need to work out, we have workarounds but an IP review may still provide some fun.

In case you think I have forgotten C++ - you are right. We also have the ability to work with others on the uDig side, we have looked into osgPlanet, have some great demos with OSSIM. I am confident we can serve up C++ code when the time and place is correct.

The fun question is if the C++ community is ready for us ;-)

Scale of OSGEO (I lost my projection here somewhere)

This was more a comment I saw slide by, that I felt was interesting (the conversation was not in IRC land so we must read between the lines):

14:48:10	Schuyler:	the argument is whether to start out large or small
14:48:13	steeler:	john weathersby says: "show me the money!"
14:48:16	mpg:	Autodesk wants to submit $250, but is fearing we are not planning large enough?
14:48:17	Schuyler:	i.e. hiring an executive director etc
14:48:31	Schuyler:	Arnulf is arguing to start small and sustainable
14:48:38	Schuyler:	Gary is arguing to start big to stay big

I would also like to see the open source spatial community go for it, build some momentum and take on the world. After all we are spatial hackers - the world is our Domain :-)

Aside: we are realists, professional, and know that data is what is important here. More importantly your data.  One of the things that would be very benifitial, and was mentioned during the meeting, was testing facilities with the usual suspects present. So defacto standards need to come along for the ride.

I hope press releases are held back until we get more communities on board. I am sure we have all had to explain that the established open source projects with a broad base of developers will be represented after the next round of project IRC meetings. I have explained at least 4 times and it has only been a day.

Community

Over the course of the meeting I made several silly suggestions:
- a reverse bounty system, based on the success of the PostGIS GiST Improvement Project, went over like a brick...
- setting up test data and services, and making our verification scripts available to OSGEO supporters, yep another silly idea

The point is this, we are a productive community, willing to share (and shoot down) ideas with abandon.  We do already work with each other: OSSIM and uDig are working towards a bit of integration - come on OSSIM we need WKT CRS parsing before it can go live); and promote each other (GeoServer and MapBuilder is in our uDig walkthroughs, MapServer and PostGIS in our demos). Open source spatial is already the great alternative, now we have a name.

As for my ideas, this one faired better (in response to selecting the interim board based on those present:
- I am well content with the range of projects represented - and in open source we start from a position of trust.

I can't say it better then that, lets rock and roll.