Note: This is mirrored from my new OSGeo-related blog on osgeo.org (www - rss)

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.

Members Added

The initial 25 charter members were expanded to a full 45 voting members after a public nomination process. These are the members who are responsible for voting in the Board. Regular members were also invited to join at no cost and without any formal process. The development of a membership management application is currently underway, which will allow members to formally sign up.

Committees Established

Several committees are overseeing day-to-day work and special projects:

• A Board of Directors was created early on and expanded to include 9 representatives from around the world. The Board has been very active in setting direction, policies and helping in general.
• Website and Systems Administration committees - focused on website content and infrastructure maintenance and development
• Project Incubation - monitoring and guiding projects through the incubation process
• Promotion and Visibility - developing promotional material, coordinating OSGeo presence at conferences, creating press releases
• Conference planning - helping organise the annual OSGeo FOSS4G conference event
• Fundraising - raising funds to cover day-to-day costs of the foundation and its projects
• Public Geospatial Data - working towards making more data publicly available and building tools for finding it
• Education/Curriculum development - working towards a set of teaching tools for bringing open source into the academic mapping and GIS environment

Projects Joining

The primary goal of OSGeo is to help further develop and promote particular software projects. An initial set of projects joined the incubation process at the beginning and since then a couple have graduated and a few more have joined. Even more are waiting for approval to join the process. Projects can be loosely categorised into the following groupings.

As promised a few weeks ago I've started to hobble together a basic code sample (aka snippet) repository tool. Based on the fields that I identified, here is the process I have went through. Aside from planning it takes about 10 minutes to set up. I won't cover installing Drupal, but will assume you have that already (this site is powered by Drupal).

Install Content Construction Kit (CCK) Module

This module allows you to create your own "content types". I use a default "blog entry" type for my normal entries on this site - consisting of a simple title field and a text body field. Obviously we need more than that to power the code sample repository. That's what CCK is for.

Venka Raghavan passed along this link to a Vietnamese TV news spotlight that mentions OSGeo several times while covering the Open Source Geoinformatics Workshop session. This was part of the GeoInformatics for Spatial-Infrastructure Development in Earth & Allied Sciences (GIS-IDEAS) 2006 Symposium. It was held in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, 9-11 November 2006.

Following this meeting, over 40 participants decided to join together to form an OSGeo Vietnam chapter. OSGeo also sponsored a booth at the conference and members participated in various other events and forums.

A few people have been asking for some general updates on various topics, so I thought I'd summarise a few things that I've been watching or involved in and will roll them into a few blog entries. This might help you catch up a bit with the activities of others under OSGeo.

Sponsorship

One of my main tasks has been to work with the OSGeo Fundraising Committee to solicit and organise new sponsors. The intent is to build more relationships with other organisations that share goals with OSGeo and to strengthen the foundation laid by the generous support from Autodesk.

The committee has set up two different ways of sponsoring OSGeo. One is directed generally toward the foundation - to cover promotion, infrastructure costs, etc. - we call this the Foundation Sponsorship method. This can be thought of as the general funds of the foundation.

When you step back and look at the broad open source GIS application landscape, what tools are obviously missing? I don't mean the tiny pieces of your favourite functionality, rather those big gaping holes in the bottom of your boat that would sink your efforts to implement open source in your organisation.

I've heard at least three common issues brought up time and again - all of which seem closely related:

High quality cartographic output - The ability to easily select layers, stylise their features and output for printing, often in an industrial environment. Most packages have some sort of output, though many of the web applications appear to be focused on raster output. GMT is often mentioned as "something to look at" whenever I ask others for their opinions, but I haven't gone there yet.

Last week I brought up the idea of setting up geospatial mentors that would act like a professional apprenticeship programme. I am particularly interested in one that focuses on open source technology, as I believe that to be a professional means much more than simply learning commercial products. There is certainly a place for that, but other institutions handle these needs quite well already.

This got me thinking about what I like to be associated with - what kinds of things would I wear as a badge of professional recognition? As I thought about the kinds of professional association that I would like to have in my career, the one I kept coming back to was OSGeo.

For a while now I have day-dreamed about an online repository for code samples and examples covering the wide range of open source geospatial applications. I'm not talking about a CVS repository for a particular project, rather a place to store multi-language, multi-platform, multi-application code (and even command-line) text snippits.

New users would especially appreciate being able to find examples easily by browsing by language or sorting entries by platform, etc. For example, imagine you wanted to find a C++ example for programming a QGIS widget. It would simply be two filters from the mega list of online samples. Because all content would be text it would also be fully searchable. This would be powerful for the experienced programmer who wants to check out someone elses style or find a particular function or string.

Many of my colleagues have had to listen to my 'grand vision' over the past few years, which was centered around the idea of web-based access to a wide range of geoprocessing functions. My hope was to remove as many desktop dependencies as possible, while utilising the most current web technologies to make a desktop-like experience powered by a server.

Today I was looking at an encouraging example that does some of what I've always wanted to do.

A common question that comes up in various OSGeo forums is: Should OSGeo seek to provide a professional certification programme for individuals? This is usually in the context of educational curriculum development. The common answer is: "No, we don't want to go there, at least not yet. If we create curriculum, let institutions use it and grant their own diplomas if they want."

One of the reasons it is a recurring question, without a clear logical solution, is because one of the goals of the Education Committee is to create and/or distribute training materials for open source products. It makes sense that an organisation that is intimately involved with several projects would also be the ones to help pull together curriculum for teaching in an academic or professional environment. But where does OSGeo's involvement in applying that curriculum end?

OSGeo is definitely an International organisation. You can guess this by watching some of the discussions on the various mailing lists or looking at the makeup of the OSGeo board. However, it is more obvious when looking at the Local Chapters wiki page. There are more than a dozen regional or linguistic groups growing under the OSGeo banner. Some simply have a language-specific wiki, mailing list or OSGeo sub-domain. Others have a formal legal entity that is associated with OSGeo at a high level, complete with committees, a board and finances.