Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Changes (and proposed changes) regarding the Code of Conduct

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

Adding one more comment: Please, I implore you: Do not remove the 
assumption of good faith from OSGeo's principles!


"Assumption of good faith" and "Quietening down somebody" are totally 
different things. In her blog on thebias.com Annalee somewhat hastily 
mixes the two up when she says:


"The harm is that telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that 
if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, 
police their reactions, and question their perceptions."


OSGeo and any open and welcoming community cannot exist without 
assumption of good faith. The opposite to assuming good faith is perfect 
paranoia which is only destructive. It is also quite impossible to set 
up rules to regulate everything without suffocating. So let us talk and 
interact as best we can from all our gender, cultural and individual 
background. If it starts to get out of hand - and this will happen again 
- look at it closely, have concerned people on a functioning CoC and 
repair the damage.


Unfortunately I have not followed the issue which Sara Safawi indicated 
as her reason to want to leave OSGeo closely enough to be able to 
understand all the intricacies. But it actually did not feel good, even 
from a distance. Maybe a functioning CoC could have helped? People on a 
CoC have to take every complaint serious (reverse citing Annalee): Do 
not "minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their 
perceptions".


And lastly, sometimes it is also time to let things go. If Sara has no 
intention of picking this up again we may want to let it rest.



Thanks,

Seven


Am 11.12.18 um 02:09 schrieb Daniel Morissette:

I agree with Jonathan here. I also have my own similar personal story 
from ~20 years ago where I used a French expression as the opening 
line in an email where all the rest was in English... and some of the 
recipients (co-workers) could very rightly have been offended. 
Actually some wondered if I might have been mad at them, but instead 
of jumping the gun, they asked me directly, I explained the meaning of 
the French expression and why I used it in this context, they 
explained that there was a corresponding slang word... that day they 
learned a new French expression and I learned a new word of English 
slang. I was not being careless, I simply had no way to know at the 
time that there was a corresponding English slang word that could have 
been offending, because I am not a native English speaker.


We all had a good laugh in the end, but if it was not for their 
assumption of good faith this could have turned into a huge mess.


I realize that not everybody will agree and I am not planning to enter 
this CoC debate... I just wanted to relay an experience.


Stepping out of this thread now.

Daniel



On 2018-12-10 7:44 p.m., Jonathan Moules wrote:

Hi Maria,

Just a thought, but I'm not sure getting rid of the assumption of 
good faith is a good idea. To do so would be basically assuming 
people are guilty until proven innocent which runs counter to how 
these things should work.


To use a personal anecdote, many years ago I had a black flatmate who 
I was joking around with and I made a comment that it turns out is a 
negative racial epithet. Being young and unworldly, I didn't know 
that at the time and certainly didn't mean it in that context, it 
also has a perfectly innocent context - the only one I'd ever been 
exposed to - which is how I was using it.


Now, reading your thebias.com link, I can see that the author there 
would suggest I be pilloried for what was an honest mistake. They'd 
say I was being "careless" or "ignorant" and stepping on their toes. 
But I don't think either is fair because it's not reasonable to 
expect people to know everything that could offend everyone, 
especially somewhere as multicultural as the internet.


For example, consider this symbol: a simple thumbs-up emoticon 
that's commonly used to signify "it's all good" and "thanks". Well, 
it turns out that it's "an obscene insult" in some cultures! I didn't 
know that until a few seconds ago when I went searching for a simple 
example.


I have learnt over the years from experiences in both directions that 
it's best to always assume good faith if possible. Humans may be the 
species with the most complex communication on the planet, but that 
doesn't mean we don't fail often.


@Ben - Thanks for sharing World Human Rights day. I'm a long time fan 
of the UNDHR!


Cheers,
Jonathan


On 2018-12-09 12:49, María Arias de Reyna wrote:

Dear OSGeo community,

As you may already know, I have been working for the last months in 
improving our community procedures[1] to make it a safer space. 
Recent events in the community have shown that we have a lot of work 
ahead.


We all, as OSGeo, must remove the recent bullying and campaigning 
mentality that is unfortunately gradually become a part of our 
culture. Disclosing private data or hinting threats is not helpful 
and can only 

[OSGeo-Discuss] Kudos to the CRO, Board, Members and OSGeo in general

[Arnulf Christl]

This is just a big Thank-You and Well-Done to the CRO, current Board,
new nominees, SAC and whoever else may have been involved in setting up
this year's election.

Having been a CRO earlier in the life of OSGeo myself and knowing how
much work this involves I can just bow to the amazing job all of you
did. The future of OSGeo looks bright with such a great team, members
and nominees!


Thank you All!

Seven

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] (no subject)

[Arnulf Christl]

Kiringai,
thanks for your thoughts but I cannot quite follow your argument. Or
rather, you are just reiterating an old claim by some proprietary
vendors stating that their software provides more operations security
/due to being developed in a proprietary model/. This claim has never
been evidenced and probably cannot be proven anyway.

Please excuse me if I misunderstood your argument.

Thanks,
Arnulf

Am 29.03.2017 um 05:50 schrieb Kiringai Kamau:
> Steven this has been the experience of many corporates as theyrise the   
> ladder of visibility. Indeed from an operations security perspective 
> proprietary solutions end up being cheaper and secure making corporates 
> migrate to proprietary ones. 
>
> However, if the desire is to just collect data fir value added analytics it's 
> best to retain the open source dynamic. Proper planning always guides the 
> best model to use. 
>
> Kiringai 
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On 25 Mar 2017, at 20:06, Steven Feldman  wrote:
>>
>> Implementation, customisation, integration, training, ongoing support, 
>> maintenance and hosting are the main costs regardless of whether the 
>> underlying software is proprietary or open source
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Registration for STDM Code Sprint 2017 opened

[Arnulf Christl]

Dear All,

the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) is a concept to model a continuum
of people-to-land relationships in informal environments. Legacy
cadastre and land registry software from the developed world has proven
to lack flexibility and literally does not meet the bill, financially.

The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) has closed this gap by developing
fit-for-purpose STDM software tools under an Open Source license based
on well known core technology including QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR and
Sahana Eden. To further extend the functionality of these tools and also
to improve the know-how in the region, GLTN organizes a code sprint.

The code sprint is free of cost to attend thanks to the kind sponsorship
of GLTN and OSGeo. A formal application is required including a CV and a
list of practical  experience in the field. Find more details here:

http://stdm.gltn.net/docs/STDM_Code_Sprint_2017.pdf
 
There are limited travel grants available for applicants who fit the
profile and preferably come from Africa, Asia, and South America.
Application closes on March 31st. Register here:
http://bit.ly/stdm-code-sprint

Please apply soon, seats are limited. This is hot. With FOSS4G 2018
coming up in Africa we really, really want to support and grow the
African OSGeo Local Chapter!

Please feel free to forward to your domain, we are trying to avoid lots
of cross postings.

Considered keywords include: land innformation, land administration,
cadastre, social tenure, land rights, open source GIS, QGIS, PostGIS, LADM.


Thank you and best regards,

Arnulf Christl
(OSGeo GLTN Liaison Officer, Organizer)

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial at the 2017 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty

[Arnulf Christl]

Dear Open Source geo and spatialists,
it appears that the last mail on this topic was too heavily loaded with
URLs and got intercepted by a variety of Spam filters. This is an
abbreviated version. Find the full text and information on the web site
of the 18th Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty held from
March 20 to 24, 2017 in Washington D.C. at

http://www.worldbank.org/landconference2017

The theme of the conference is "Responsible Land Governance: Towards an
Evidence-Based Approach and invites submission of abstracts." At the
last FOSS4G conference in Bonn Klaus Deininger (Lead Economist at the
Development Research Group of the World Bank) specifically asked for
support from the Open Source Geospatial Community to support the Land
Information Domain with technical know-how.

Two of the Key topic areas of the conference are perfects matches for
our community:

2. Harnessing geospatial data, cloud platforms and other data technologies

Policy application automated data analysis; combining administrative
data, statistics and geospatial data; consistent use imagery; standards
and interoperability; block chains; UAVs; mobile phones; participatory
mapping; open data; open source; spatial data infrastructure; data access.

4. Delivering land administration services at scale

Cost effective and fast expansion of coverage; reliability;
transparency,  monitoring performance;  linking land information systems
to tax, courts, land use, financial institutions; business models for
service delivery; addressing capacity gaps, fit-for-purpose.

Please consider submitting an abstract until end on Midnight October 31,
2016 (Eastern Standard Time). Abstracts require 800 to 1,500 words.

There will also be an "Innovation Fair" with a sessions of Lightning
Talks on geospatial, cloud and data technologies and a session with 90
minute MasterClasses.

Best regards,
Arnulf

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[OSGeo-Discuss] 2017 World Bank Land and Poverty Conference CfP and Registration

[Arnulf Christl]

Folks,
following up from the FOSS4G 2016 conference in Bonn where "Land
Information" was one of the four key topics this CfP from the World Bank
may be of special interest to us.

I have personally attended the last three editions of this conference.
Land Information is obviously all about geospatial and location but the
community is widely unaware of the potential of geospatial software and
even less so about Open Source. There are only a handful of software
vendors in the domain and practically no Open Source providers.

In his keynote at FOSS4G Klaus Deininger (Lead Economist at the
Development Research Group of the World Bank) specifically asked for
support from the Open Source Geospatial Community to support the Land
Information Domain with technical know-how (see the video of his
presentation
).
If we (from the Open Source community in general) manage to get in a
dozen of talks then we may even get a separate conference thread.
Software tools from the FOSS4G domain like QGIS, PostGIS, OpenLayers,
etc. already permeate many projects but are oftentimes not sustainable
because of a lack of service providers and direct contact to the
communities. This domain has basically been waiting for us.

Please note that the deadline for abstracts is approaching fast! See
below for details:

The 2017 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty

will be held from *March 20 to 24, 2017* in Washington D.C. under the
theme of /Responsible Land Governance: Towards an Evidence-Based
Approach/*. *

*Reminder call for paper abstracts *

Please note the deadline for individual paper abstract submission is
*Midnight October 31, 2016 (Eastern Standard Time). *Please check the
conference website

for more information on conference themes, submission instructions and
review process.

*Call for lightning talk proposals: innovation day on March 23*

The conference is partnering with the Open Geospatial Consortium
 to organize the 'Innovation Day'
("lightning talks" presenting use cases, followed by hands-on
demonstrations). Please submit proposal for a lightning talk through
theconference website

(see also priority themes, submission instructions

and review process).

*Call for MasterClass proposals: learning & knowledge sharing day on
March 24*

The knowledge sharing and learning day (March 24) is an opportunity for
presenting and discussing cutting edge tools, research approaches, and
methodologies during focused 90 min sessions. Please submit proposal for
a MasterClass through the conference website (please view the submission
guidelines
).


*Early bird registration*

We encourage you to take advantage of the /early bird registration rate
of $250/, which will expire on December 15, 2016.

The conference brings together technical experts, government
representatives, academia, CSO and industry from all over the world.

We very much look forward to your abstracts and meeting you at the
conference.

Best regards,
Land Conference Team

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http://www.worldbank.org/landconference2017
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo and Open Data?

[Arnulf Christl]

Hey Jachym,
maybe that was a misunderstanding. Yes, OSGeo focuses on software but we
also have an official geodata committee (sometimes called Public
Geodata, sometimes Open Geodata):
http://www.osgeo.org/content/projects/geodata.html

It is not active currently but there have been some activities like
signing an Open Letter regarding the INSPIRE Directive and signing an
amicus  brief for an open data court case in California (2012):
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Face_to_Face_Meeting_Seattle_2012

OSGeo supports and partners with OpenStreetMap in several events, some
local chapters support both organizations (like FOSSGIS e.V. in Germany,
currently discussing whether to also become an official OSMF local
chapter).

So yes, some things have been going on but less actively and maybe more
on a reactive basis. Kind of: If somebody approaches OSGeo with a good
cause we are happy to support it.

And Open Data is always a topic on FOSS4G conferences.

Hth,
Arnulf


On 17.10.2016 11:37, Jachym Cepicky wrote:
> Hi Sanghee,
> I was told some months ago (and I believe, it was Jeff), that we
> (OSGeo.org) are solely software foundation - therefore we do not care
> about open data
> 
> maybe things have changed?
> 
> J
> 
> po 17. 10. 2016 v 5:08 odesílatel Sanghee Shin  > napsal:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Can anybody share presentation file about the OSGeo and open data,
> if any? I’m invited to give a keynote talk at ‘Open Data in Action
> Conference’[1] in Korea and I don’t want to make the file from the
> scratch.
> 
> FYI, OSGeo Korea[2], R Korea[3], Open Data Institute(ODI) Seoul[4],
> Open Knowledge(OK) Korea[5] will co-host the event on 15th Nov near
> Seoul. The main theme of the conference is ‘Experiment on Open Data
> based Society.’ Anybody who has similar interest can join this
> conference.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 신상희
> 
> [1]http://event.r-kor.org/
> [2]http://www.osgeo.kr/
> [3]http://r-kor.org/
> [4]http://seoul.theodi.org/
> [5]http://okfn.kr/
> ---
> Shin, Sanghee
> Gaia3D, Inc. - The GeoSpatial Company
> http://www.gaia3d.com
> 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4GNA - Someone is watching you :-o

[Arnulf Christl]

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Paul, Daniel,
thanks.

+1

Arnulf (OSGeo President Emeritus)

On 16.12.2015 18:16, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> Agree w/ Daniel in all ways. We want our events to succeed, no? So we
> use marketing techniques to do so. Emails and so on. And we track who
> opens them so we can get better at marketing. Like any other business
> trying to succeed. Mail chimp is currently convenient, in the past
> other technologies were convenient (I spammed people in 2007 using a
> custom perl script, because I am a God Among Men), in the future
> different technologies will be convenient. But they are all going
> towards making a good event.
> 
> Naturally the first targets of marketing the event will be people who
> have attended past events under the same/similar umbrella. I provided
> the 2007 attendance list to foss4g events for a number of years until
> it had grown entirely stale. I felt good about it. I revelled in the
> goodness of it.
> 
> I have spammed. I will spam again, in the service of a good cause.
> That is my weakness. That is my strength.
> 
> P.
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Daniel Morissette
> <dmorisse...@mapgears.com> wrote:
>> On 2015-12-16 10:00 AM, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2015/12/16 18:37, Pat Tressel wrote:
>>>>
>>>> MailChimp is a very popular product. If you have a provable accusat
ion
>>>> against them -- that they were acting **independently of the accoun
t
>>>> administrator** to alter lists, then that would be significant. As 
Rob
>>>> has stated, MailChimp did not do something by itself. The list was
>>>> aggregated from previous lists and events in which people participa
ted.
>>>
>>>
>>> I have also received a similar unsolicited mail. I would like to kno
w
>>> who has authorized
>>> the aggregation and usage of email address from "previous lists and
>>> events in which
>>> people participated". I think every event has a privacy policy and
>>> e-mail address provided
>>> are only to be used for communicating about the specific event and n
ot
>>> for aggregating for
>>> future use.
>>>
>>
>>
>> For the record, the use of such mailing services for FOSS4G promotion
 is not
>> new. Even FOSS4G 2015 (Seoul) used MailChimp in a very similar way, I
 still
>> have some of their mails in my archives, and I'm sure other past even
ts did
>> as well but I didn't bother digging any further.
>>
>> How can you realistically expect to do outreach to new people if you 
only
>> announce your event on osgeo-discuss?
>>
>> This anti-anything-locationtech-does drama is becoming boring, please
 let's
>> get over it.
>>
>> --
>> Daniel Morissette
>> http://www.mapgears.com/
>> T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
>>
>> http://evouala.com/ - Location Intelligence Made Easy
>>
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4GNA - Someone is watching you :-o

[Arnulf Christl]

he above assertions, of course).
>> 
>> The point is, there seems to be a fairly strident Location Tech 
>> bashing going on, and it is getting to be tiring. Let's stick to 
>> keeping OSGeo a fun, useful champion of free and open geospatial 
>> without becoming anti-anything-free, partisan and possibly
>> irrelevant.
>> 
>> -- Puneet Kishor Just Another Creative Commoner 
>> ___ Discuss mailing
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>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>> 
>> 
>> ___ Discuss mailing
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>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> 
> 
> ___ Discuss mailing list 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] NSA - Someone is swatting you :-o

[Arnulf Christl]

nity.
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Ian Edwards
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Puneet Kishor <punk.k...@gmail.com
>>> <mailto:punk.k...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > On Dec 16, 2015, at 3:07 PM, Pat Tressel <ptres...@myuw.net
>>> <mailto:ptres...@myuw.net>> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > If you want to point at a company as being the Evil Empire
>>> these days, you'd be more accurate pointing at Apple (cancelling
>>> licenses for Mac clones, suicides at Foxconn, restrictions on gettin
g
>>> apps on iTunes, removing fitness tracker products from their stores
>>> because they might compete with the Apple Watch, etc. -- do a search
>>> for "apple anti competitive practices")
>>>
>>> You were doing fine until above. The rest of your post is indeed
>>> very relevant and useful and argues correctly for sanity instead
>>> of knee-jerk accusations (until the above assertions, of course)
.
>>>
>>> The point is, there seems to be a fairly strident Location Tech
>>> bashing going on, and it is getting to be tiring. Let's stick to
>>> keeping OSGeo a fun, useful champion of free and open geospatial
>>> without becoming anti-anything-free, partisan and possibly
>>> irrelevant.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Puneet Kishor
>>> Just Another Creative Commoner
>>> ___
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Board election: no re-elections this year?

[Arnulf Christl]

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There are several really good answers to this question. Michael Gerlek
provided the stats and Hans Gregers Peterson nailed it in his post here
(thanks to both!):
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-September/014892.html
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-September/014888.html

This is a really good insight and worthwhile to read.

Some more personal notes here:
http://arnulf.us/sevendipity/archives/49-OSGeo-Director-Retrospective.ht
ml

Thanks,
Arnulf

On 23.09.2015 09:17, Gert-Jan van der Weijden wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> Preparing to cast my vote for the board election, I noticed that all 4
> (Jáchym, Bart, Gérald, Jorge) board members who reached the end of the
ir
> 2-year term are not standing for re-election. (besides that: Anne
> decided not to stay for her 2nd year of her 1st term)
> 
> Some questions arise:
> - Is the board membership such a demanding job that members always
> resign after 2 years?
> - Is this a good thing, to make sure we dont'have board members who ar
e
> tied to their seats?
> - Or is this a bad thing, with board members switching too fast to rea
ch
> their goals?
> 
> Respones from anybody are as always appreciated, but the 4+1 resigning
> board members and the current candidates are especially invited to giv
e
> their humble opinion on this.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Gert-Jan
> 
> 
> Gert-Jan van der Weijden
> Voorzitter Stichting OSGeo.nl
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 2015 Charter Member elections

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Vasile,
thanks from here too for this very useful recap. I posted it more or
less verbatim to the discussion page of the Charter Members article in
the Wiki:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:Membership_Process



All,
on the OSGeo Wiki we currently have 605 self categorized OSGeo members:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member

This is the best we can currently do for anybody who is interested in
becoming an OSGeo member apart from subscribing to the Discuss mailing
list or being nominated as a Charter Member to be then elected by an
eclectic group of geospatial whizzes.

Just to reiterate: Charter Members are usually those who set up the
charter of an organization:
A charter member of an organization is an original member; that is, one
who became a member when the organization received its charter.
- From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter

After signing the Charter they can continue to participate actively in
the organization, go away or even die - without any of this actually
changing the Charter.

What is OSGeo's Charter? My guess is that the section About the Open
Source Geospatial Foundation contains what we would consider our Charter.

As a legal body incorporated in Delaware, USA we needed to implement how
the newly founded organization should support this charter. This has
been written into the bylaws:
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/incorporation/bylaws.html

In ARTICLE VII Members of our bylaws we specify how we plan to manage
membership. There is no talk of Charter Members, just members.
Looking at what we did almost 10 years ago it was probably the right
thing to do at that time. But it may be good for an update. My
suggestion is to change this section into regular membership and remove
the self-pollinating aspect. At the same time we could update our
About section into a proper Charter and then go ahead and operate as
any regular member association.

On a personal note: I do not see any danger of a hostile take-over. This
was an important catch we put into the DNA of OSGeo when we founded it.
There never was a hostile take-over and I cannot really see it coming.
We are big enough to not need to fear this anymore. And we would make
OSGeo a much more open and welcoming organization if we moved away from
this somewhat strange self pollinating system.

I am not really passionate about this and only consider it an overdue
maintenance patch to how OSGeo functions. If there is no broad interest
I am happy to drop the ball, otherwise I am as happy to help build a
more appropriate member mechanism.


Best regards,
Seven

- -- 
Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)
OSGeo President Emeritus
OSGeo Founding and Charter Member
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Arnulf_Christl


On 30.06.2015 13:24, Gert-Jan van der Weijden - Stichting OSGeo.nl wrote:
 Vasile: thanks for this very useful recap. 
 
 
 A few remarks from a relative newbie as I am ;-)  
 - the name of the wiki page with the charter members is already called
 voting members ;-)
 - the charter member list grows and grows. Over the year only 1 person
 retired from the charter member list
 - charter membership seems to drift towards a title of honour, instead of a
 mechanism for proper board elections and prevent a hostile take-over
 - the voting participant rate for the board elections is low over the years:
 70% - 85%. I would expect 100%!
 
 
 Therefore, I'd suggest a voting membership with:
 - a fixed number of seats (e.g. 72)
 - with a certain numbers of seats reserved for each region [51], (e.g. 6*6,
 and thus 36 remaining wildcard-seats).
 - in case of not enough candidates, or note enough votes for a candidate
 from a certain region, seats can remain empty
 - a 3 term (instead of a lifetime membership, re-election possible)
 - and a mechanism in which not all seats are elected every year, but
 one-third every year, and thus all seats once every three years
 
 
 Just my 2 eurocents,
 
 Gert-Jan
 
 
 
 [51] http://bl.ocks.org/jsanz/raw/779f9b9954b92461fa50/
 
 
 
 
 
 -Oorspronkelijk bericht-
 Van: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
 [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] Namens Vasile Craciunescu
 Verzonden: maandag 29 juni 2015 15:08
 Aan: OSGeo Discussions
 Onderwerp: [OSGeo-Discuss] 2015 Charter Member elections
 
 Dear all,
 
 First of all, please accept my apologies for the delay in sending this
 message to you and, again, apologies for the length of the message.
 
 Let's start with some basic information about the charter member elections
 followed by a little bit of history. I know that many of you already know
 the details but the community is quite large now and I find this recap
 useful.
 
 OSGeo charter members [1] are the blood of our foundation. They are voted
 into this category by the other charter members. They have the right to vote
 in elections for other charter members and for board members. They are
 required to act in accordance with the goals and bylaws [2

[OSGeo-Discuss] MYGEOSS - Open Data Challenge

[Arnulf Christl]

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Folks,
this may be interesting for our open geodata group. Have an application
using and leveraging Open Data, preferably in the EU? Then check this out:
http://digitalearthlab.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mygeoss/call.cfm

Have fun,
Arnulf
- -- 
Arnulf Christl (Director)
The metaspatial Institute:
Open Source Data Standards
http://www.metaspatial.net
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo in Belgium

[Arnulf Christl]

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On 17.03.2015 23:34, Johan Van de Wauw wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:47 AM, Dirk Frigne dirk.fri...@geosparc.com 
 wrote:
 1. Do you agree with the fact that we investigate how we can join forces
 with the open knowledge foundation Belgium to start up the Belgium
 chapter of OSGeo
 We should definitely work together. I believe we should first set our
 goals with OSGeo Belgium and then choose whether it makes sense to be
 under their umbrella.
 
 Kind Regards,
 
 Johan

...sounds like a good plan.


This mail is purposefully cross posted to the Local Chapters Mailing
List [0] since that is the place where we try to collect information for
folks interested in acting locally.


Just a few notes from experience: Running a legal entity to organize
things actually eats up a good chunk of volunteer resources which could
be better used to actually promote Open Source, organize conferences and
so on.

The German language chapter as we call it, operates a legal entity,
the FOSSGIS e.V. [1]. This did not prevent us from having the 2013
edition of the annual FOSSGIS conference take place in Rapperswil,
Switzerland [2] (Note to foreigners: Swiss are *not* Germans and
typically also speak French, Italian and Romansh).

Same for Austria where we have an OSGeo Day at every AGIT [3] conference
since 2006 and will have a full fledged German language FOSSGIS
conference in 2016 (a few months prior to FOSS4G in Bonn). Next note to
foreigners: Never ever even suggest to an Austrian that she is German :-)

So we (the OSGeo tribe at large) try to cater for everybody who speaks
the same language here and at the same time minimize the effort we need
to put into operating a legal entity. Even OpenStreetMap likes us and
uses the FOSSGIS e.V. as the legal body to manage their local budget,
fund their servers, accounting, GPS rental and so on.

This is just an example how things can work together even across
cultural differences and that you do not need to have a legal entity in
place to organize national or regional conferences and meetings.


Have fun,
Arnulf

[0] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/local-chapters
[1] http://www.fossgis.de/
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FOSSGIS_2013
[3] http://www.agit.at/


- -- 
Arnulf Christl (Director)
The metaspatial Institute Certification:
Open Source - Open Data - Open Standards
http://www.metaspatial.net/en/institute
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Unable to Upload JPG on Wiki

[Arnulf Christl]

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On 23.11.2014 08:04, Ravi Kumar wrote:
 Pl solve the problem of uploading Jpg/png on wiki.
 
 Has the method changed from the one on Wiki ?
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:Upload
 
 Ravi

Ravi,
this link works fine for me. What is not working for you?

Best regards,
Arnulf


- -- 
Arnulf Christl (Director)
The metaspatial Institute Certification:
Open Source - Open Data - Open Standards
http://www.metaspatial.net/en/institute
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Arnulf Christl]

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On 06/23/2014 09:33 PM, b.j.kob...@utwente.nl wrote:
 I am very dissapointed in this whole membership/fees discussion.
 In reading the emails one does not see the international volunteer
 community I would like to think OSGEO is (should be), but it rather
 seems we are dealing with a US-based professional organisation,
 mostly keen on not paying US taxes, and that is not what I want
 OSGEO to become...

Hey Barend,
if it makes you feel any better - I can still see the volunteer driven
OSGeo and have no intention to drop out just because there are ideas
to move to a more consistent way of mapping members. I have been CRO
in two consecutive years and cannot see any advantage in sticking with
the non-system we have had so far. Instead, my hopes are that a fee
based membership can broaden the base we are one. It would make so
many things so much easier.

I also believe that we have grown to a size where we do not have to
fear a hostile takeover so that a lot of the self-referencing and
sustaining mechanisms we put in place to start with are not required
any more.

It would be a pity if others and especially existing OSGeo Charter
Members would feel negatively about the proposed suggestions so I beg
you all to voice your concerns now. And we should make sure that we
pass any changes of this format by the existing Charter Members and
make sure there is a fat majority of support for it. Otherwise we
would betray our principles which is exactly what we tried to prevent
with the existing system in place.


Have fun,
Arnulf


 -- Barend Köbben ITC - University of Twente PO Box 217, 7500AE
 Enschede (The Netherlands) +31-(0)53 4874 253 @barendkobben
 
 
 
 
 On 23-06-14 21:00, Alex Mandel tech_...@wildintellect.com
 wrote:
 
 
 On 06/19/2014 11:58 AM, Peter Baumann wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 good - and important! - discussion! Being Charter Member I am
 somewhat concerned:
 
 - I am surprised that the common democratic procedure of
 election is perceived as creating dissent.
 
 Well it's somewhat conjecture without public confirmation that
 someone walked away from OSGeo because they didn't get picked.
 
 - yes, democracy is expensive, but generally it is considered
 worth the effort. - is lifelong membership compatible with
 community participation?
 
 Nope and we've actually have discussed in the past what the rules
 should be to weed out charter members who no longer particpate in
 the community.
 
 - Recognised OSGeo Community Leaders seem to get determined
 in a very special, selective way (as compared to standard
 election procedures).
 
 Altogether, the criteria seem to make OSGeo a self-sustaining
 group: insiders will remain insiders for a lifetime, outsiders
 will...well, face a hurdle.
 
 So the contrary of open.
 
 Just an idea: what about applying the OSGeo incubation
 checklist to OSGeo itself to determine feasible procedures?
 
 cheers, Peter
 
 I think the discussion of membership fees is timely this year now
 that we officially have our IRS 501c4 status. Why, well when we
 were aiming for 501c3 that would have given us donations as tax
 write offs for US members. Without that incentive to donate,
 membership now seems like it might be the way to push individuals
 to donate.
 
 The amount should be researched quite a bit though, factoring in
 how to reach maximum membership, with lowest overhead (collecting
 and tracking membership will incur a cost).
 
 Since we don't maintain a huge office, an in print journal, a
 lobbyist or things like that we should be able to be much lower
 that other professional societies. I agree it should be relative
 to country of members, and there probably should be some sharing
 in places where local chapters exist - or the local chapters
 trust us to split the money back to them for things they need.
 
 I'd suggest something in the $20-$30 US, students $5-$10. Maybe
 with a sliding scale like PBS or Kickstarter, where if you
 voluntarily pay more in a given year you get swag of some sort.
 
 I'm trying to avoid the syndrome (I'm guilty of this) where one
 pays for membership only in a year when it will get you a
 discount worth more than the membership for the conference.
 
 I agree with Arnulf that these decisions should probably go to
 e-vote of all the current charter members, the boards
 responsibility is to put forward a coherent plan for the vote.
 Obviously if the board all hates the ideas it should stop there
 for now.
 
 Thanks, Alex
 
 
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Membership fee (was: Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members)

[Arnulf Christl]

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María,
good points, thanks. I strongly believe that paying a fee for one type
of membership must not estrange anybody else who wants to participate.
And I don't think that this is in the interest of anybody proposing a
paid scheme.

Trying to gauge the volunteer effect to decide whether somebody is
worthy or not takes somebody to actually measure. Who would be this
poor sod? What should she measure and how? Mission impossible and no
fun, so forget it. :-)

I guess the paid membership - if it comes, will just be complimentary
to what we have. Ideally we can somehow carry all Charter Members over
to a paid model, just because it would simplify our process so much.
And maybe this is also a perfectly sound step to more professionalism.
This does not mean that those who do not pay are less professional,
instead they will also profit from a more professional environment.

Having said that, all who use the word professionalism have probably
just run out of sound arguments. :-)

Cheers,
Arnulf

On 06/24/2014 02:38 PM, María Arias de Reyna wrote:
 Hi,
 
 I have been reading this conversation silently and for my point of
 view, if paying helps OsGeo, then subsctription fees are welcome.
 
 But there is a big but: for students and people who are
 unemployed, subsctription fees can be very discouraging. It
 happened to me with IEEE and I still haven't returned to them after
 so many years. Once I couldn't pay the membership, it was like
 forcing me to go away. I know that OsGeo is more open and that even
 people who is not a member can participate actively on mailing
 lists and projects but... it helps if you feel that you are part of
 the community.
 
 So, couldn't we add some kind of volunteer work to compensate the
 fee on some cases? For example: people that work on maintenance of
 the servers, or translate very hard or help on conferences, can
 they get a discounted or even free subscription?
 
 This way, all OsGeo members will contribute to OsGeo (with fees or
 work) and people who are very active but cannot pay the fees will
 have also recognition.
 
 Just a random thought.
 
 
 On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Mateusz Łoskot
 mate...@loskot.net mailto:mate...@loskot.net wrote:
 
 On 24 June 2014 14:02, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas js...@osgeo.org 
 mailto:js...@osgeo.org wrote:
 El 24/06/14 13:26, Mateusz Łoskot escribió:
 
 Shortly, I see nothing wrong in expecting as an organisation 
 that if an individual aims and agrees to be nominated for OSGeo
 Charter Member she/he also agrees to donate on
 yearly/monthly basis.
 
 
 Yes but I see that as different things, one is being nominated
 and elected as member, and other being an active sponsor of the 
 organization.
 
 They are complementary, some people want to be involved on the
 organization donating time, others maybe just want to donate
 funds,
 and finally some crazy people both :-)
 
 So, you prefer that Charter Members and non-Charter Members is not
 differentiated (among other things) by paid membership.
 
 But when it comes on deciding who is on the board or any other
 important
 issue, I prefer having a membership that has been in one way or
 the other elected by the community, not one that has paid their
 annual
 fee.
 
 AFAIU, nobody proposed to replace Charter Members election with
 membership fees, but to complement the former with the latter.
 
 Ha! Not exactly that, but maybe doing better outreach effort
 to show where the money is used would help to a better
 understanding of
 the need
 of funds.
 
 Budgets are published and anyone willing to ask can reach
 them, but maybe being more proactive on showing the need for
 money could
 help to
 increase the perception that maintaining OSGeo is not free
 (as
 free beer).
 
 Yes, but that is more a technical issue. So, it's the easiest
 one to solve, I think.
 
 It's not important now but anyway I didn't explain well myself.
 I
 see it
 as an organizational and marketing issue. As our treasurer, the
 task of
 publicly remembering where the money comes and goes is probably
 one of most ungrateful jobs anyone can have here, only for a
 tireless
 special one.
 
 The books show where the money comes from and where it goes, so
 still technical issue, but yes it requires hard work to maintain. 
 However, the marketing side...is a different issue that is much 
 harder to work on than the former one, I think.
 
 Best regards, -- Mateusz  Łoskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net 
 ___ Discuss mailing
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Arnulf Christl]

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[...]
 Is the board going to vote on this proposal or all charter
 members?
 
 Thanks, Alex

This is actually a good question and maybe points towards a new way of
leveraging our Charter Membership. I would think that it would be
worthwhile to pass major changes in the way the organization operates
by the Charter Members. They basically own the organization and
(should) have vetted interests in how it takes shape. In the long run
[1] I can see an electronic voting tool where every now and then
something bubbles up the board deems relevant enough that all (a
majority, quorum, etc.) of our Charter Members wrap their heads around.

Have fun,
Arnulf

[1] The definition of long is directly proportional to the level of
interest we can trigger in Charter Membership, so maybe indefinite. :-)

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Anyone available to speak about OSGeo at FIG in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia?

[Arnulf Christl]

 the Relevance*”. There is a specific reason for
 choosing this theme. A wise man once remarked, “In every Failure,
 therein lies the Seed of Achievement’”; we share the opinion that
 “In every Challenge, therein lies the Seed of Enhancing
 Relevance” for Surveyors across the Globe, who have been
 diligently enhancing skills and knowledge, whilst exploring new
 technological platforms to deliver quality services, and
 contributing to the nation building success of their respective
 countries.
 
 The technical programme will include a broad professional and 
 scientific programme: during 4 consecutive days, offering up to
 10 parallel sessions and workshops. This will allow more than
 700 presentations in the entire broadness of the surveying
 profession. The carefully prepared Technical Programme will offer
 both specially invited high profile presentations and papers that
 are selected through the open call for papers procedure.
 
 This Call for Papers is announced both for *peer review* papers
 and *non-peer review* papers. Detailed information and important
 dates are attached.
 
 We invite you to submit abstract and full paper for *peer review
 paper by 1 November 2013 *and abstract for*non-peer-review paper
 by 1 December 2013. *Please use this link 
 http://www.fig.net/fig2014/submission.htm. Submission of abstract
 will open end of August 2013.
 
 You will find more information in the attached invitation and on
 the conference websitewww.fig.net/fig2014
 http://www.fig.net/fig2014. At this stage we do not have all
 information needed but the website is continuously updated.
 
 We look forward to receiving your abstract.
 
 Kind regards,
 
 *Claudia Stormoen* FIG Office and Events Coordinator
 
 
 
 Description: Description: Beskrivelse: Beskrivelse: 
 cid:image001.jpg@01CC1EEC.0552F660
 
 
 
 International Federation of Surveyors Fédération Internationale
 des Géomètres Internationale Vereiningung der
 Vermessungsingenieure
 
 International Federation of Surveyors Kalvebod Brygge 31-33 
 DK-1780 Copenhagen V Tel: + 45 3318 5505 Fax: + 45 3886 0252 
 claudia.storm...@fig.net mailto:claudia.storm...@fig.net 
 www.fig.net http://www.fig.net/
 
 Description: Description: Beskrivelse: 2014_logo_simple_150 *FIG
 Congress 2014 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 16-21 June 2014* Web site:
 www.fig.net/fig2014 http://www.fig.net/fig2014
 
 
 
 Description: Description: FIG_Sofia_2015_logo_200
 
 *FIG Working Week 2015 – Sofia, Bulgaria 17-21 May 22, 2015*
 
 Web site: www.fig.net/fig2015 http://www.fig.net/fig2015
 
 
 Subscribe monthly FIG e-Newsletter at: 
 www.fig.net/pub/subscriptions/getnewsletter.htm 
 http://www.fig.net/pub/subscriptions/getnewsletter.htm Join FIG
 at LinkedIn: 
 http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2669121trk=group-name Join
 FIG at Twitter: https://twitter.com/FIG_NEWS
 
 
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Inaugural webinar of ”Open Geospatial Science Applications” webinar series on 18th October

[Arnulf Christl]

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Margherita,
I support your initial bewilderment, no need to appologize. The OCG is
also stuck on gotomeeting and I always have to borrow a Mac or
participate from my mobile phone which makes the whole effort suck. I
think we should try to avoid these solutions as widely as we can.

Barry,
I like your suggestion to support http://openmeetings.apache.org/ But I
would like to get some more realworl feedback on folks who have used it,
I have no experience at all with this software.


Having said that - do we really need a full fledged *conference*
software to transmit a webinar? That feels a bit overblown. Even
reveal.js has a server push version to direct slides to many people -
and that is just JavaScript. 8-) Talk through a regular radio stream and
receive questions through IRC, Twitter, or whatever else people throw at
you.

I am probably hilariously oversimplifying things but I really don't
think we need to go webex or gotomeeting for a seminar.

Cheers,
Arnulf


On 18.10.2013 17:08, Margherita Di Leo wrote:
 Hi,
 
 
 On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Miles Fidelman
 mfidel...@meetinghouse.net mailto:mfidel...@meetinghouse.net wrote:
 
 Lluís Vicens wrote:
 
 On 18/10/13 15:05, Norman Vine wrote:
 
 
 On Oct 18, 2013, at 8:57 AM, Margherita Di Leo
 dileomargher...@gmail.com
 mailto:dileomargher...@gmail.com
 mailto:dileomargherita@gmail.__com
 mailto:dileomargher...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Hi!
 
 looks like the system requirements for the platform
 chosen for the webinar do not support Linux.. I just
 received the confirmation email with the specs. I mean,
 are you kidding?
 
 
 Work-arounds (or lack thereof) aside - the are you kidding comment
 still applies.  Just as a not, webex DOES support Linux.
 
 This is absurd.
 
 I apologize if i sounded too “harsh” in my previous comment, and would
 like to add that I really appreciate the webinar initiative and thank
 all those involved in that. 
 That said, my point is that the technology used for deliver OSGeo's
 message is not a mere detail. Of course, the best choice would be to use
 an open source software for that, honestly I'm not aware if there are
 any (reliable). 
 But, whatever platform you choose, should IMHO at very least not
 discriminate against Linux users, which are often constrained to use
 tricks to access other services elsewhere.. because it's simply
 exhausting [1], and we shouldn't expect to be discriminated against by
 those who are supposed to deliver the very same message that we do.
 
 Thanks and best regards
 
 madi
 
 
 [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gGXylVz6KI
 
 
 
 -- 
 Best regards,
 
 Dr. Margherita DI LEO
 Scientific / technical project officer
 
 European Commission - DG JRC 
 Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES)
 Via Fermi, 2749
 I-21027 Ispra (VA) - Italy - TP 261

 Tel. +39 0332 78 3600   
 margherita.di-...@jrc.ec.europa.eu
 mailto:margherita.di-...@jrc.ec.europa.eu
 
 Disclaimer: The views expressed are purely those of the writer and may
 not in any circumstance be regarded as stating an official position of
 the European Commission.
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Copy Left and Copyright for Geospatial software

[Arnulf Christl]

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On 17.10.2013 08:26, Ravi Kumar wrote:
 How many of the OSGeo Softwares are Copy Left and Copy Right
 Pl give a link where therationale is explained especially for OSGeo.
 I am aware that Free Software Foundation has things explained.
 This is to a great extent true only in countries like USA where software
 can be copy righted.
 In many countries software does not come under Copyright. Example: India.

Ravi,
this is interesting. What kind of rights are attributed (if any) to
software in India?

There is a comparable / yet very different issue in continental European
legal systems. Copyright did not exist here until they were introduced
from anglo-saxon jurisdictions in the last century together with patents
and the like. We instead had originator's rights which is an
intangible asset / cannot be sold like copyrights. The concept of
copyright, patents and IP is now enforced by WTO, WIPO and the like
and keeps the machine running for good or bad.

Free and Open Source Software licenses come from within the legal system
of Copyrights and re-implements a commons which works perfectly (other
than the tragic materialistic commons). But people lack an understanding
of the difference between sharing material goods and digital goods [7].

I believe the closest to a rationale on OSGeo's take on Free and Open
Source Software (but not an officially endorsed position) can be found
in recursive loops here:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Commercial_Software
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Free_Software
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Open_Source

Cheers,
Arnulf

[7] http://arnulf.us/Share

- -- 
Arnulf Christl (Director)
The metaspatial Institute Certification:
Open Source - Open Data - Open Standards
http://www.metaspatial.net/en/institute
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] UK Interoperability Assessment Plugfest - Reply to Mike Saunt

[Arnulf Christl]

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Jody,
well said, I agree. But we may want to improve / enhance this message
some more because it is one of the key aspects of Open Source. You
want it? We want provide to provide it. What do we need? A well
defined scope of the problem (outcome of a plug-fest). To get there we
ideally want a concise user story (plan what plugs to test in the
fest). Then we need a commitment to get the funding to implement it.

As a result you get the feature you need in forseeable time - as Open
Source and for all to share.

For us Open Sourceres this is obvious but for many used to proprietary
software thinking this is not obvious at all. Therfore... /me is
preaching to the converted crowd here, sorry about that. :-)

Cheers,
Arnulf

On 10/09/2013 01:14 PM, Jody Garnett wrote:
 My point was more that a negative result is a positive
 opportunity to fund our open source projects :D -- Jody Garnett
 
 On 09/10/2013, at 8:12 PM, Ian Edwards iedwards@gmail.com 
 mailto:iedwards@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Hi Jody, all
 
 Take a look at the Iris project on OSGeo live for powerful NetCDF
 handling http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/iris_overview.html
 
 The OSGeo Live 7.0 version of the NetCDF4 python library
 dependency is broken, but can be easily fixed with...
 
 pip install -I netCDF4==1.0.4
 
 Ian
 
 
 
 On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Jody Garnett
 jody.garn...@gmail.com mailto:jody.garn...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 For the Sydney Climate Change Interoperability Plugfest we had
 a different kind of response. Much of the climate change data
 was provided in NetCDF format which most of those participating
 were unable to deal with.
 
 This kind of response highlighted an opportunity for funding. -- 
 Jody Garnett
 
 On 01/10/2013, at 6:36 AM, Peter Cotroneo 
 peter.cotro...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk 
 mailto:peter.cotro...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk wrote:
 
 Hi,
 
 I'd like to address Mike Saunt's concerns about the negative
 backlash if software doesn't have a positive outcome during the
 UK Interoperability Assessment Plugfest.
 
 It’s a valid concern indeed, but the general philosophy of the
 plugfest is that there should be no negative outcome.  If issues 
 are uncovered during sprint 1, then vendors have time to either 
 fix them or to indicate how they will resolve them in the future 
 through their road maps.  I believe the latter will be seen as 
 quite positive in the GI industry.
 
 Peter This email is only intended for the person to whom it is
 addressed and may contain confidential information. If you have 
 received this email in error, please notify the sender and
 delete this email which must not be copied, distributed or
 disclosed to any other person.
 
 Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are
 personal
 to the writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance 
 Survey. Nor can any contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's
 behalf via email. We reserve the right to monitor emails and
 attachments without prior notice.
 
 Thank you for your cooperation.
 
 Ordnance Survey Adanac Drive Southampton SO16 0AS Tel: 08456
 050505 http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
 http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/
 
 ___ Discuss mailing
 list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org mailto:Discuss@lists.osgeo.org 
 http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
 
 ___ Discuss mailing
 list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org mailto:Discuss@lists.osgeo.org 
 http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
 
 
 
 
 
 ___ Discuss mailing
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 http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
 


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Arnulf Christl
http://metaspatial.net
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] UK Interoperability Assessment Plugfest

[Arnulf Christl]

Folks,
I very much support this activity and believe that it would be quite
beneficial to participate. Ordnance Survey is a powerful multiplier in
the UK geospatial business due to its position as the main data
provider to the public. There is a license program in place called
PSMA (Public Sector Mapping Agreement) entitling all public sector
broad access to OS data. Not Bene - this is a lot more than what is
published through the Open Data program licensed under the Open
Government License. I think it is important to understand what data is
available and also what can be done with the service offering of
Ordnance Survey. The plugfest will additionally allow you to
interoperate with other software you typically encounter in the area.

Cheers,
Arnulf

PS: I am not working for or paid by Ordnance Survey or OGC and nobody
made me say ony of this, it is just my own little gut feeling.


On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Peter Cotroneo
peter.cotro...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk wrote:
 Hi,

 I'm leading a joint Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Ordnance Survyey 
 interoperability plugfest to test OGC standards in the UK geospatial 
 community.  So far, there has been a lot of interest from commercial vendors 
 in the UK, and I would very much like that the open source community be 
 represented at the plugfest as well.

 The plugfest will be held at Ordnance Survey headquarters in Southampton, UK. 
  There will be two sprints, one on the 17th of October and the other on the 
 9th of December.  There will also be a results presentation on the 10th of 
 December.

 The following link gives more information about the plugfest, including a 
 call for participation document.

 http://www.opengeospatial.org/node/1892

 The deadline to participate is the 2nd of October.  I hope that OSGeo can 
 join us!

 Cheers,

 Peter

 Peter Cotroneo CGeog (GIS) FRGS
 Senior Manager - Geospatial Web Services
 Products  Innovation
 Ordnance Survey
 Adanac Drive
 Southampton
 SO16 OAS
 www.ordnancesurvey.co.ukhttps://webmail.ordsvy.gov.uk/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx
  | 
 peter.cotro...@ordnancesurvey.co.ukmailto:peter.cotro...@ordnancesurvey.co.uk
 Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email.






 This email is only intended for the person to whom it is addressed and may 
 contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, 
 please notify the sender and delete this email which must not be copied, 
 distributed or disclosed to any other person.

 Unless stated otherwise, the contents of this email are personal to the 
 writer and do not represent the official view of Ordnance Survey. Nor can any 
 contract be formed on Ordnance Survey's behalf via email. We reserve the 
 right to monitor emails and attachments without prior notice.

 Thank you for your cooperation.

 Ordnance Survey
 Adanac Drive
 Southampton SO16 0AS
 Tel: 08456 050505
 http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk

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Making sense with your spatial data
http://www.metaspatial.net
http://arnulf.us
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Looking for a one pager write up for Why Open Source is good.

[Arnulf Christl]

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On 09/12/2013 02:43 PM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:29 PM, María Arias de Reyna 
 delawen+os...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 
 
 On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 4:08 AM, Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) 
 bob.basq...@ci.stpaul.mn.us wrote:
 
 Hi All,
 
 I'm looking for a one pager write-up for a Booth display for
 why Open Source Software is a good bet for businesses.
 
 Anything I can use freely or pointers would be appreciated.
 This is intended as an informational handout.
 
 I have a start on something below, maybe it's easier for folks
 to add to these.  I'll go off and look some on Google
 
 Thanks in advance.
 
 
 
 Hi,
 
 Look for the four liberties of free software. Here are some
 hints: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html And don't
 use open, use free: 
 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

 
 And don't say 'commercial', say 'proprietary' (if that's what you 
 mean). I'm surprised Arnulf hasn't already jumped in on that
 point!
 
 Free and open source software can be commercial.
 
 Barry

Haha, busy preparing my presentation Introduction to Open Source for
FOSS4G. Plus I had the hope that at some point the message would get
across and be picked up by others, and - Voila - it worked. :-)

- -- 
Arnulf Christl
http://metaspatial.net
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Election Results 2013

[Arnulf Christl]

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Dear OSGeo Members,
the election 2013 has been completed and we are happy to announce the
new board of directors [1].

Here are the final results from the voting for the open seats of the
OSGeo Board of Directors. There were four seats open and they have been
filled by (no particular order):
* Jáchym Čepický
* Jorge Sanz
* Bart van den Eijnden
* Gérald Fenoy

Thanks to all candidates for going through the elections and exposing
themselves. All six candidates received excellent support with more
then 60 votes each. Overall voting participation was 71% (128 out of
180) and there were no tie scores to arbitrate. Thank you to all who
voted!

Your complete resulting Board is:
* Anne Ghisla
* Bart van den Eijnden
* Cameron Shorter
* Daniel Morissette
* Frank Warmerdam
* Gérald Fenoy
* Jáchym Čepický
* Jeff McKenna
* Jorge Sanz

With the election results published the new board of directors becomes
effective as of now.

Congratulations and please welcome the new and and re-elected OSGeo
directors!

We wish to thank the outgoing directors for their continued support of
OSGeo and for helping to run a fantastic organizations. We thank all
candidates who stood in this election and all OSGeo Charter Members
for their contribution and votes.


Best regards,
Michael, Jakob and Arnulf

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Election_2013_Results

- -- 
Your Chief Returning Officers
on behalf of OSGeo
Arnulf Christl and Michael Gerlek
with the help of Jakob Tworek
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2013
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Reminder: OSGeo Board election phase is coming to an end!

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Folks,
in case you are a Charter Member and have not yet received an email
from our dedicated Charter Member mailing list then it is high time
that you contact us.


Best regards,
your CROs on behalf of OSGeo

- -- 
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Regional Chapters (was: Re: FOSS4G North America 2015 Expressions of Interest)

[Arnulf Christl]

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NA Local Chaps;
I think it is high time for a North America Chapter. Maybe it suffices
to start with slightly formalizing the existing team which already
selects and organizes the conferences. I am sure that eventually a
full-fledged Regional Chapter will form so it is just a questions of
when to officially start. As we all know publish early and release often
is the way to go. It seems like we are almost beyond publishing early.


All,
we are thinking about similar ideas in Europe with a strong CEE group
already under way and Germany, UK, Spain, The Netherlands and Italy
pretty strong already we will eventually have to coordinate anyway. One
way to go forward would be to have representatives of the existing local
chaps form a higher level group. The Spanish speaking group has gone a
different way and organizes around a language regardless of location.
Both can be good.

If you have ideas how to do this we'd be interested in learning about
them and sharing experiences. Please subscribe to the Local Chapters
list and let us know:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/local-chapters


Best regards,
Arnulf

On 30.08.2013 17:12, David William Bitner wrote:
 With the second FOSS4G North America in Minneapolis in the history books
 and looking forward to the Big Show in Portland next Fall, I'd love to
 start the ball rolling to drum up interest in hosting FOSS4G North
 America in the Spring of 2015.
 
 There are two parts here:
 
 1) Who's interested? If you have a local community that you think would
 be great to host, speak up! If you have questions as to what it takes,
 ask. If there's a city you'd love to see take this on - start pestering
 them.
 
 2) If there is competing interest, we'll need identify the selection
 process/committee. We can take the easy route here and do something
 simple like prior Conference  Program Chairs make up the committee, or
 we can try (again) to create a more formal group for North America to
 handle things like this. If you have $.02 on this - bring it up now!
 
 I'd love to see us be able to move on this and be able to select a venue
 by the end of November if possible to make sure there is ample time for
 planning. Important thing right now is to start the discussion and get
 folks thinking about what we need to do to make the next FOSS4G NA
 another awesome event!
 
 Cheers!
 
 David
 
 -- 
 
 David William Bitner
 dbSpatial LLC
 
 
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Open Source Geospatial Software, Data and Services
http://www.metaspatial.net
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[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board elections 2013

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Folks,
the board elections are well under way. With still more than a week to
go we already received votes from 50 members (27.6% of the total,
including those who may drop to inactive level by not voting this year).


If you are a Charter member and did *not* receive a reminder and
instructions a few minutes ago through the list - or if are unclear on
how to proceed then please contact c...@osgeo.org so that we can help you.


Best regards,
your CROs on behalf of OSGeo

- -- 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2013
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Mailmain password reminders

[Arnulf Christl]

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Folks,
fyi: Markus Neteler already fixed this [1]! All reminders turned off.

/me bows  thanks.

List creators: Please remember using this as the default setting.

Arnulf

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/sac/2013-August/004552.html


On 26.08.2013 13:41, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
 Mailman has a bunch of useful command-line scripts:
 
 http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/site.html
 
 I reckon a combination of list_lists looped over, calling
 'config_list' with a file to set the password reminder parameter will
 do it.
 
 Be happy you aren't using majordomo for list management, you'd
 probably have to do this by sending emails.
 
 
 On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Jeff McKenna
 jmcke...@gatewaygeomatics.com wrote:
 I did start to go through each list one by one manually a few months
 ago to change that setting...but I may have given up at some point.
 Hopefully some mailman-guru can step up to let us know the magical
 setting for all lists.  Or could it be some sort of job/script that
 runs each time a new list is created?  Not sure.

 -jeff



 On 2013-08-26 5:44 AM, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote:
 Folks, apparently some lists still have the monthly password
 reminder active. I remember that there was general consent that we
 should turn these off. But Mailman does not have an option to do
 this for all lists at once (or /me too dumb to find the setting).
 OSGeo currently operates 200 public plus a few dozen private lists
 and I am too lazy to check them all individually. But I did turn
 off discuss (this one) and a few other larger onces now.

 Please feel free to ping me if you are on a list that still reminds
 you and want it turned off by an admin.

 If you are a list operator yourself please check the setting Send
 monthly password reminders? and set it to off - except at least
 51% of your subscribers cry out in pain and want it back on. :-)

 Have fun, Arnulf

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- -- 
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Open Source Geospatial Software, Data and Services
http://www.metaspatial.net
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[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board or Director Elections 2013

[Arnulf Christl]

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Dear Charter Members,
the OSGeo Board or Director Elections start tomorrow:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Elections_2013

With more than 180 members it has become necessary to somewhat
streamline the process. To this effect we have created a dedicated
Charter Member mailing list. You will receive the announcement of the
elections in a few minutes through that list again. You cannot
subscribe yourself and you cannot mail to that list. The only purpose
is to help the CRO to manage things. All reminders will also be sent
through this list, a week, 2 days and one day before the elections end.

If you do *NOT* receive an email detailing the elections process
within the next minutes then we do not have your correct contact data.
In this case please contact c...@osgeo.org immediately!

All,
please note that we had to postpone the announcement of the results to
8 September to account for different time zones.

Best regards,
your CROs on behalf of OSGeo

- -- 
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Nomination for the OSGeo Board of Directors

[Arnulf Christl]

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Folks,
this is a reminder that there is one more day left to nominate
candidates for the board of directors. Nomination period ends on 20
August 23:59 wherever you currently are.

Thanks for all the nominations, seconds and endorsements so far, we
already have a great list of candidates:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Member_Nominations_2013

Please note that elections will start on Friday 23 August. Only
Charter Members are eligible to vote, we will start to contact Charter
Member in the next days.

Best regards,
Your CROs on behalf of OSGeo

- -- 
Arnulf Christl
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Arnulf
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo as LMO at INSPIRE

[Arnulf Christl]

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Hi,
OSGeo was registered (again after we already did in 2009) a few weeks
ago [0] and discuss and board were informed 12 July [1]. I am happy to
pass on the contact point role to anybody interested.

I don't think we can register as an LMO for said reasons.

Cheers,
Arnulf

[0] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/INSPIRE_SDIC
[1] http://lists.gfoss.it/pipermail/gfoss/2013-July/028065.html



On 08/19/2013 03:04 PM, Rafał Wawer wrote:
 Why not go for SDIC? After all OSGeo is a community and is
 strictly spatially oriented, focusing not only on data but mostly
 on software, which is also an important part of any SDI, isn't it?
 :)
 
 Cheers: Raf
 
 
 DR. Rafal Wawer The Department of Soil Science Erosion Control and 
 Land Protection The Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation
 - State Research institute ul. Czartoryskich 8 24-100 Puławy
 Poland
 
 Member of the OSGeo Foundation: 
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Wawer_Rafal
 
 mobile: +48601516434 web: www.erozja.iung.pulawy.pl
 
 
 
 
 -Original Message- From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org 
 [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jachym
 Cepicky Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 2:52 PM To: Rafał Wawer Cc:
 'OSGeo Discussions'; 'OSGeo-Board' Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss]
 OSGeo as LMO at INSPIRE
 
 Hi,
 
 as far as I understand this, we are either SDIC (Spatial Data 
 Interest Community) or INSPIRE stakeholder organisation not 
 registered as an SDIC or LMO (according to 
 http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/action/mif)
 
 We are definitively not LMO (Legally Mandated Organisations (LMOs) 
 are all the Member States’ public authorities, institutions and 
 bodies, ...) - thank you for the correction
 
 In this case, I would propose, register OSGeo as stakeholder 
 organisation not registered as an SDIC or LMO (?)
 
 Jachym
 
 Dne 19.8.2013 14:02, Rafał Wawer napsal(a):
 HI Joachim, Is LMO status not restricted to national gov units 
 dealing with SDI or organizations delegate by those?
 
 Cheers: Raf
 
 
 DR. Rafal Wawer The Department of Soil Science Erosion Control
 and Land Protection The Institute of Soil Science and Plant
 Cultivation - State Research institute ul. Czartoryskich 8 24-100
 Puławy Poland
 
 Member of the OSGeo Foundation: 
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Wawer_Rafal
 
 mobile: +48601516434 web: www.erozja.iung.pulawy.pl
 
 
 
 -Original Message- From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
  [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jachym 
 Cepicky Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 12:41 PM To: OSGeo 
 Discussions; OSGeo-Board Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo as LMO
 at INSPIRE
 
 Hi,
 
 I would like to register OSGeo as INSPIRE LMO (Legally Mandated 
 Organization)  for the ongoing Call for Expression of Interest
 for INSPIRE development. Between 
 http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/42/list/2
 
 http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/7/type/welcome
 
 
 Any hint, blocker, idea, proposal?
 
 
 Jachym -- Jachym Cepicky Help Service - Remote Sensing s.r.o. 
 jachym.cepi...@gmail.com HS-RS: jac...@hsrs.cz http://bnhelp.cz 
 http://les-ejk.cz
 
 
 
 
 -- Jachym Cepicky Help Service - Remote Sensing s.r.o. 
 jachym.cepi...@gmail.com HS-RS: jac...@hsrs.cz http://bnhelp.cz 
 http://les-ejk.cz
 
 
 
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Election 2012 Results

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Dear OSGeo Members,
the election 2012 has been completed and we are happy to announce the
new board of directors [1].

Here are the final results from the voting for the open seats of the
OSGeo Board of Directors. There were five seats open and they have been
filled by, in alphabetical order:
* Anne Ghisla
* Jeff McKenna
* Daniel Morissette
* Cameron Shorter
* Frank Warmerdam

Thanks to everyone for running, all candidates received good support (
40 votes each). The voting participation was 68% and there were no tie
scores to arbitrate. Thank you to all who voted.
Your complete resulting Board is:
* Peter Batty
* Michael Gerlek
* Anne Ghisla
* Mark Lucas
* Jeff McKenna
* Daniel Morissette
* Cameron Shorter
* Frank Warmerdam

Congratulations and please welcome the new and and re-elected OSGeo
directors!

With the election results published the new board of directors becomes
effective as of now.

We wish to thank the outgoing directors for their continued support of
OSGeo and for helping to run a fantastic organizations with a great
memberships and lots of energy. We thank all candidates who stood in
this election and all OSGeo Charter Members for their contribution and
votes.


Best regards,
Michael and Arnulf

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Election_2012_Results

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[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Elections 2012 closed, results to be published tomorrow (2012-08-14)

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Hello OSGeo,
the OSGeo Board election 2012 period has closed. We are now tallying
votes, double checking them and will publish the final results tomorrow.

Best regards,
Arnulf  Michael

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Elections 2012

[Arnulf Christl]

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Dear Charter Members,
we are approaching the end of the 2012 elections [0]. The Board
nomination period has ended and all nominees listed on [1] have
confirmed that they are happy to stand for election.

Please take your time to read through the nomination, the acceptance
and thoughts from each candidate and then proceed to vote for 5
different candidates by adding them one per line to an email to be
sent to c...@osgeo.org.

Voting closes at 23:59 (your timezone) 12-August-2012!

Please caefully follow the instructions given on the Wiki [2] in order
to be able to submit a valid email and MAKE SURE TO SEND IT TO
c...@osgeo.org ONLY. Otherwise your vote may become public or just
disappear somewhere. You will receive a confirmation of your
successful vote. If you do not receive a confirmation within 24h of
submitting your mail please contact c...@osgeo.org

Thank your for taking on this responsibility,
Your CROs
(Arnulf Christl  Michael Gerlek)

[0] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2012
[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Member_Nominations_2012
[2]
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2012#Vote_for_new_Board_Members_-_2012-08-03_-_2012-08-12

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Cancellation of FOSS4G 2012 conference to be held in September in Beijing

[Arnulf Christl]

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Dear Community,
it was announced on July 10, 2012 by the FOSS4G local organizing
committee that the FOSS4G 2012 conference that was scheduled to be
held in September in Beijing has been cancelled. The OSGeo board was
of course disappointed to hear this. Like anyone who follows the OSGeo
conference or board public mailing lists we have known for some time
that the local committee was facing various challenges. But we wanted
to give the local team the maximum chance to try to pull together an
event.

FOSS4G has been successful being a truly global conference, taking a
major event around the world with most of the work done by local
volunteers. We've had great success with this approach, with excellent
events in cities including Sydney and Cape Town - but this approach
also has its risks. We will look carefully into what we can learn from
this year to mitigate the risk in future.

Despite this setback, the FOSS4G event has continued to expand around
the globe this year: The global FOSS4G 2011 event in Denver was the
largest yet, with 900 people from 42 countries and great reviews from
attendees. Plans for FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham are already very
advanced with a very strong team which will beyond any doubt organize
a great event.

FOSS4G has also evolved into multiple regional events in addition to
the global one. We already had several successful regional FOSS4G
events this year; one for North America in Washington DC, one for
Central and Eastern Europe in Prague and FOSS4G Japan will take place
in November. Many regional geospatial conferences now also include a
strong OSGeo or FOSS4G steam. As an example find a list of events
where OSGeo Live was distributed:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_History

OSGeo normally presents the Sol Katz award at the annual FOSS4G
conference, to recognize an individual as a leader in the geospatial
Open Source community. The Sol Katz award will also be awarded this
year, but it is still to be determined how, when and where the
presentation will take place. The same applies for the OSGeo Annual
General Meeting which will be rescheduled in due course, several
options are already on the table.

With kind regards,
the OSGeo Board of Directors

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Board nomination starts 2012-07-23

[Arnulf Christl]

Dear OSGeo Charter Members,
the Board nomination period starts 2012-07-23. Until then candidates can
present their ideas to give us an idea what to expect from them if we vote
them into the board.

Best regards,
CRO

Seven (aka Arnulf)
http://arnulf.us
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[OSGeo-Discuss] New Charter Member Nominations

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Dear OSGeo members,
this is a gentle reminder that the new member nomination ends on Friday
this week [0]. If we have more than 20 nominations this will be followed
by the two week elections period starting on Saturday 7 July and ending
on 20 July.

One questions came up a few times, this is to clarify things:

 I have a question about supporting candidates, I know in person the
 majority of them and am glad to see their candidature. Shall I second
 their nominations in each thread, or can I send a global mail
 mentioning all the candidates I wish to support?

There is no formal need (as in required) to second nominations to the
CRO. If you wish to express your support for any candidate please do so
on the discuss list. Whether in one or in many emails is up to you.

A request:
PLEASE be so kind and send the email address of the nominee along with
the nomination to ! c...@osgeo.org ! (as is clearly noted in the
instructions... :-).
It makes it so much easier for us to send out the confirmation emails
and maintain the nominee list. And if you really want to make it easy,
please also send your own OSGeo Wiki user page and the nominee's along.
And while you are at it check out the OSGeo Advocate [1] page.

Thank you,
Arnulf

(*) On the New Member Nomination page it incorrectly said 5 July,
changed now to 6 July. My bad, apologies.
[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Advocate

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[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Elections 2012

[Arnulf Christl]

Dear OSGeo Community,
it is time for the 2012 OSGeo elections [1]. As in earlier years we will
again first nominate new OSGeo Charter Members with the aim to broaden
and diversify OSGeo's global representation.

To start with we have 2 weeks to nominate new candidates. Anybody can
nominate candidates, there are no restrictions. After nomination closes
on 7 July 2012 we will have the first round of elections. Only Charter
Members are eligible to vote. The elections will add up to 20 candidates
to the group of currently 125 existing OSGeo Charter Members.

In the next round of elections the Charter Members elect directors to
the OSGeo board. The board consists of nine seats, 5 of which will be
open for this election.

Please note that the whole process is scheduled to be completed before
the annual global FOSS4G 2012 in Beijing so don't hesitate to become
active now. This is your chance to decide who is going to represent your
interests in the leadership of OSGeo.

Please take your time to read the election process in the Wiki [1] and
learn which qualifications are desirable for Charter Members and directors.

If anything is unclear or if you have questions, feel free to voice them
here on the Discuss list or send them to c...@osgeo.org.

All nominations and votes have to be sent to the email address
c...@osgeo.org. This year the Chief Returning Officers are Michael Gerlek
and Arnulf Christl.

Thank you for your contribution!

Best regards  have a nice weekend,
Your Chief Returning Officers

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2012

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [Local-chapters] Spanish Language Local Chapter elections results

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Pedro-Juan,
thanks for this update and congratulations to the new Board!

This mail is also a forward to OSGeo Discuss in case there are Spanish
speaking folks not aware yet of your activities. Please consider joining
the mailing list [1] and becoming active in the community. There are
currently also lots of activities focusing around a Latin American
FOSS4G, get involved.

Best regards,
Arnulf

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/spanish

-- 
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Arnulf Christl, President
http://www.osgeo.org


On 18.06.2012 17:18, Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses wrote:
 Hello,
 
 last week ended the election process for the Spanish Language Local
 Chapter and the Community has elected new Local Chapter Charter
 Members and a new Local Chapter Board.
 
 The new  Local Chapter Charter Members are:
 
 Maria Aryas de Reina
 Jose Gomez Castaño
 David Mateos
 Juan Ignacio Garcia Varela
 Francisco Perez Sampayo
 Leonidas Hernan Oliveira
 
 Right now we have 80 Charter Members in the Local Chapter.
 
 And the new Local Chapter Board members are:
 
 Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses
 Mauricio Miranda
 Santiago Higuera
 Maria Arias de Reyna
 Cesar Medina
 
 All the process has been documented in the wiki [1] (in spanish)
 
 The new board hasn't already meet so right now I'm still the acting
 Local Chapter Liaison Officer.
 
 Bests regards,
 
 [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Elecciones_2012_OSGeo-ES
 
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[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Governance

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Dear Members of OSGeo,
we have an important issue on governance coming up again and again. It
suggests that OSGeo Board decisions should be complemented by votes from
the Charter Members when important and strategic decisions have to
be taken. Something like this:

[snip]
 For such important decisions, I think that it would maybe
 worth making Charter members vote too, just like to get an
 major orientation decided by 120 people instead of only 8.
[snip]

Initially this sounded like a good idea to me so we discussed this in
Denver and then again in Seattle at the last f2f board meetings plus on
the list and during regular IRC board meetings. We have come to a
different conclusion and want to explain why and ask for comments.

Introducing another level of voting introduces a hierarchy to OSGeo
which we have so far avoided and which we should - in my personal
opinion - continue to avoid. We have committees for all important areas
of work. If we lack a committee any member can suggest to form it. Most
decisions are taking in the committees and they are pretty open to
everything. Some committees function better, some not so - but this is
entirely up to the regular members who make up the committees.

We have a functioning board of directors for some of the day to day
operations and to approve or reject decisions taken by committees. This
is a health check and makes sure we do not go astray. The board is
recruited and elected by trusted Charter Members. This is their role and
it is their only role. There is not need for another role at this level.
If any regular member wants to become active, go for it. Same for ex
board members. Whenever they think the current board is wrong they can
say so. And they can suggest how to do it better, just like any regular
member.

Whenever a committee does not function but a decision has to be taken
the board steps up and takes over. This is one reason why we have the
board, to keep rolling. All other decisions, especially strategic and
important ones are taken by regular members who do things.

By introducing a new level of decisions - for example the Charter
Members - we gain nothing. Instead we introduce an artificial hierarchy
which does not help anybody. Instead it will discourage regular members
to speak up and become active. And it is anti do-ocratic because it is
easy to say yes or no to a motion but so much harder to formulate that
motion in the first place. We need people who creatively bring up new
things and not decide over what others have done.

Thank you for your attention,
Arnulf

PS:
Apart form this only very few Charter Members actually speak up at all -
a big thank you to those who do! Running a Charter and Board election is
always a major pain and takes weeks to complete. It is impractical to do
this more than once a year.

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Future perspectives for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
the OSGeo board of directors has been working hard on finding ways
forward in those areas where we do not perform well. These are
especially on the business side of things. Our annual revenue has come
down considerably in the last years and we seem to lack high level
contacts to global players. Without the single sponsor Autodesk we
honestly wouldn't be where we are now but they have considerably reduced
their focused on geospatial.

We see new opportunities by starting joint activities with the Eclipse
foundation - which is in the process of spawning activities explicitly
focused on geospatial. They have lots of high level contacts but lack a
noteworthy community. This is where we in turn did exceptionally well,
we are perceived as *the* global voice for open source geospatial.

In between the community and business work (if we take them as extremes)
is a long range of things we did well and not so well and obviously
everybody will have their own opinion. If you are interested in learning
more about what the board is thinking and want to share your ideas I
suggest you subscribe to the board list and become active there. (Please
refrain from telling us you must be doing this and that but reckon
that whatever will happen does so because you also commit to actually
doing it).

Once we come to a more coherent point of view we will again share it
with this discussion list but for now would like to keep it at the
strategically interested level of things, just as open as all in OSGeo
- but not cluttering the Discuss list.

The board will start to post a few threads in the next days summarizing
the thoughts shared so far.


Best regards,
Arnulf

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FOSS4G South America (was: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GeoBolivia - hiring personal)

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi Conference Committee,
there are several mails related to having a FOSS4G in South America.
Mabye we can keep an eye on this and support them from OSGeo.

Cheers,
Arnulf

On 02/13/2012 05:24 AM, slesage wrote:
 I hope we will succeed in having a close collaboration between
 GeoBolivia and the OSGeo community in some way, this is very important
 for us. And like you say, we are very enthusiastic in seeing and
 contribute to a regional FOSS4G!
 
 El 2012-02-12 22:25, Alex Borrell escribió:
 Thanks for your nice reply, Sylvain.
  
 I would certainly like to Bolivia (People say it's beatiful). Anyway,
 if there is something I coul do to help,
 count on it! Probably we'll see the day of a Latin American FOSS4G.

 Regards

 2012/2/10 slesage sles...@geo.gob.bo [19]

 Hi Alex,

 all the personal need to work in La Paz, Bolivia. But you can
 compete and come to discover Bolivia for one year, you'll be welcome
 :)

 And like you say, there is much to do, but it's very useful to have
 a growing users community, with additionally some users switching
 from users to developers. Much to do too in translating to Spanish,
 hope we will contribute a lot this year.

 Sylvain
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Charter Member nomination: Martin Landa

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 14.11.2011 18:35, Anne Ghisla wrote:
 Dear all,
 
 I have the pleasure to nominate Martin Landa [0] for OSGeo charter
 membership.
 
 Martin is a PhD student at Czech Technical University in Prague,
 Faculty of Civil Engineering, study program Geodesy and Cartography,
 and he also teaches open source GIS and programming.
 He's well known for his long time contribution to GRASS GIS and GDAL.
 He participated with success to Google Summer of Code both as student
 and as mentor of GRASS projects. 
 Among important geospatial events in Prague, he organised the first
 GRASS community sprint [1] that was a great success!
 
 I believe Martin's experience and contributions make him a valuable
 candidate for charter membership.
 
 [0] http://geo.fsv.cvut.cz/gwiki/Landa
 [1] http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2011
 
 Anne

I second the nomination of Martin. He comes from a vibrant community
which he helped to build up and he will be a valuable charter member of
OSGeo.

Cheers,
Arnulf
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Nomination of Nicolas Bozon

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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On 10.11.2011 01:01, Markus Neteler wrote:
 I would like to nominate Nicolas Bozon:
 
 Nicolas Bozon is specialized in design of GUIs for FOSS4G based
 applications, he has contributed to various FOSS4G projects and used
 OSGeo tools for scientific research projects. He actively promoted
 OSGeo during many trainings and workshops in France and participates
 actively in national and international conferences (OSGeo fr + jp + th,
 ...), giving talks and teaching workshops. Nicolas has contributed in
 several ways to OSGeo such as conducting workshops at FOSS4G events,
 regularly participating in FOSS4G as well as active participation code
 sprints. His work has led popularizing the WPS standard around the world
 and paved way for the next generation GIS on the Cloud.
 
 Best regards,
 Markus Neteler

I absolutely second this momination.

Vested regards,
Arnulf
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSSGIS Konferenz 2012 in Germany

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

All,
FOSSGIS e.V. [0], the German language Local Chapter of OSGeo is proud to
announce the Call for Papers [1] for this year's edition of the FOSSGIS
Konferenz. (basically FOSS4G in German - yes we have a legacy name, but
- well, we are Germans...).

This local edition of FOSS4G every year attracts around 500 attendees
from business, public administration, adademia and research. This year
it will take place in Dessau [2], better known for it's Bauhaus [3]
history and a worthwile place to visit.

Please feel free to spread word in your German speaking communities
(word of mouth still accounts for three quarters of all marketing).

Have fun,
Arnulf

[0] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSSGIS
[1] http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/2012/callforpapers/
[2] http://osm.org/go/0MHPTGS2K
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] charter member nomination: Tim Sutton

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 09.11.2011 13:13, Duarte Carreira wrote:
 I would like to nominate Tim Sutton.
 
  
 
 I?m probably not the best person to introduce Tim, but here goes. I know
 Tim mostly as Developer, Project Steering Committee member and project
 co-administrator of Quantum GIS, from his educational materials (Gentle
 Introduction to GIS excellent videos come to mind), great blog posts,
 active community building activities, and using open source in his
 projects. I think Tim is one of the main promoters of open source gis
 today.
 
  
 
 I think he is based in South Africa, so the plea to diversify charter
 members geographically is also catered for.
 
  
 
 Best regards,
 
 Duarte Carreira

I wholeheartedly support this nomination (even although Tim is white,
male and about my age and thus a best fit for what we already have in
the charter membership... :-) He will be a great bridge to Africa.

Best regards,
Arnulf

PS:
I had to recheck  because I was sure that he must already be a Charter
Member but he is not - yet.
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Report from the OSGeo Board meeting

[Arnulf Christl]

Hello,
this is a short report from the OSGeo board meeting held in Denver, USA
after FOS4G 2011. We had a crammed agenda [1] with many things to talk
about and will continue to do so on the board mailing list [2] over the
coming weeks and months. Feel free to join us there and chime in if you
are interested in helping to shape the future of OSGeo. The full minutes
of the meeting will be on the Web soon, the following bullets only give
a short overview of the most important items.

* We have reconsidered the way the organization is run and came to the
conclusion that it is time for a change.
* We would like to diversify our outreach and fundraising and address a
wider range of activities.
* As a result we have decided that the existing role of a single
Executive Director is no longer the best use of our funds and we will
discontinue this role.
* We thank Tyler Mitchell for his great contribution in launching and
bringing OSGeo into operation over the last five years. We look forward
to his continued contributions in coming years.
* We will make supporting code sprints a higher priority of our goals
and draft guidelines [3] to that effect.
* As a first step we decided to financially back-up the Islandwood Code
Sprint (sign up here [4]).
* Beijing has been confirmed as the venue for FOSS4G 2012
* FOSS4G 2011 in Denver was such a great success that we will consider
hosting more regional events, including options for an ongoing North
American conference and a Central and East European FOSS4G.
* The Conference Committee list [5] will be a hot place for talking
about how to organize this.
* We adopted two Memoranda of Understanding with the International
Cartographic Association (ICA) [6] and The GIS and Remote Sensing
Centre, The University of Girona, Spain (SIGTE) [7].
* Our new treasurer is Daniel Morissette. We thank Frank Warmerdam for
the good work he has provided in this position beforehand.
* We welcome Alex Mandel as the new chair of the System Administration
Committee and thank Howard Butler for chairing the committee so far and
welcome his continued support in the System Administration Committee.
* The board confirmed Daniel Morissette as chair of the Incubation
Committee and thank our outgoing chair Frank Warmerdam for launching and
running the Incubator for more than 5 years.
* The nomination and election of up to 20 new OSGeo Charter Members are
going to take place in the coming weeks.
* We thank Peter ter Haar, product manager from Ordnance Survey and
sponsor of OSGeo [8] for sharing his insight on the adoption of Open
Source by public administrations in Europe during the board meeting.

We appreciate the momentum that has carried over from the many talks we
had with OSGeo members and friends at the conference and look forward to
a productive coming year.

On behalf of the OSGeo board of directors,
Arnulf Christl

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Face_to_Face_Meeting_Denver_2011#Agenda
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Code_Sprint_Guidelines
[4] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/IslandWood_Code_Sprint_2012
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/conference_dev
[6] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA
[7] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_SIGTE
[8] http://www.osgeo.org/sponsors

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 2010 Charter Member Selection

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Markus Neteler wrote:
 On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Paul Ramsey pram...@cleverelephant.ca 
 wrote:
 OSGeo members,

 The 2010 process is complete, and the new charter members are, in
 alphabetical order:

• Alex Mandel
• Andreas Hocevar
• Anne Ghisla
• Astrid Emde
• Danilo Furtado
• Gavin Fleming
• Hirofumi Hayashi
• Jo Cook
• Maria Brovelli
• Milena Nowotarska
 
 Congratulations - I am very happy that the global distribution of
 OSGeo + gender is now better represented also in the charter
 membership.
 
 Markus

Hi,
I want to join the congratulations to all new Charter Members, thanks
for standing up and showing this active support!

Another big thank you goes to all who have been nominated but could not
get elected due to the limitations in our process. To me all nominees
would have been a great addition underlining the great diversity of
people deeply involved with OSGeo. As Puneet sais I hope that you will
contineu to actively support OSGeo as so many regular members do.

Last but not least I want to thank our Chief Returning Officer Paul for
taking on the responsibility of organizing the Charter Member elections
again.

Looking forward to another exciting year of OSGeo.

Have fun,
Arnulf.

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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSSGIS 2011 Call for Papers eröffnet

[Arnulf Christl]

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Folks,
the FOSSGIS conference (FOSS4G's small sibling) has opened the Call for
Papers [1]. It will be in German language but we all manage some
English, so feel free to come visit beautiful Heidelberg from  5th to
7th of April 2011.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/wiki/CfP

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Geopaparazzi released

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Andrea, All,
this is an excellent example of how the OSGeo trademark is being
protected by the community. At the same time constructive discussion
on the trademark policy is helpful to evolve how we deal with these
questions. It is good to see growing interest in using the graphics.

And please by all means please feel free to use the standard OSGeo logo
to link back to OSGeo.

As a side note to the broader community: Whenever you feel that you come
close to using the trademarked version of the OSGeo logo and colors or
want to explicitly use it in a context you are unsure of, feel free to
let the marketing mailing list know so that we can discuss this up front.

Best regards,
Arnulf

andrea antonello wrote:
 Dear colleagues,
 today we finally released the first version of Geopaparazzi on the
 android market. The project is released under GPLv3 an available on
 the homepage of the project [0].
 
 Geopaparazzi is a tool developed to supprot very fast qualitative
 engineering/geologic surveys. It integrates completely with the BeeGIS
 digital tablet extentions, i.e. the data are imported straight into
 the GIS from the phone for further processing [1].
 
 Geopaparazzi is sold on the Android market and supports the
 development of Geopaprazzi itself as well as the projects developed by
 the same team: JGrass, JGrassTools and BeeGIS.
 
 That said, I leave you to the documentation on the main website.
 
 Thanks for the attention,
 Andrea
 
 
 [0] http://www.geopaparazzi.eu
 [1] http://tinyurl.com/35zucxt
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: OSGeo Board Election 2010 Results

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Paul,
thanks again for organizing the board elections. It is great that we
could get this done in time prior to FOSS4G so that the new board can
meet there in real life. This promises to become a very productive meeting.

Howard, Ari,
thanks to both of you for serving on the board for two full years and we
hope to continue to see you give advice to the OSGeo board in your
specific domains. We will lack the European and education background of
Ari and miss Howard's direct engagement from our systems committee.

Tim and Daniel,
welcome to the board and be prepared for lots of activities in the
coming months. We need to look into funding and acquire new and more
sponsors. The local chapters of OSGeo are developing great but many
would like to see a closer relation to the OSGeo Foundation. The public
geodata committee is developing interesting ideas around cataloging that
could turn into a new OSGeo service and last but not least we will want
to improve the incubation process to better serve the projects and the
users.


All,
thanks all for trusting me with another term on the board of directors
and I am excited to get going with the new team. See (hopefully most of
you) in Barcelona.

Best regards,
Arnulf.


Paul Ramsey wrote:
 OSGeo,
 
 Here are the final results from the 2010 voting for the open seats of
 the OSGeo Board of Directors. There were four seats open and they have
 been filled by, in alphabetical order:
 
 * Arnulf Christl
 * Daniel Morissette
 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Tim Schaub
 
 Thanks to everyone for running. The voting participation was 82% and
 there were no tie scores to arbitrate.
 Your complete resulting Board is:
 
 * Arnulf Christl
 * Chris Schmidt
 * Daniel Morissette
 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Geoff Zeiss
 * Jeff McKenna
 * Markus Neteler
 * Ravi Kumar
 * Tim Schaub
 
 We will complete the 2010 election process with the selection of new
 Charter Members in September after FOSS4G.
 
 Yours,
 
 Paul Ramsey
 2010 Returning Officer


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President OSGeo
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source vs Closed source

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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Bob Basques wrote:
 All,
 
 We've got a discussion going on in the office about the subject line.
 I was wondering if folks here had any pointers to online information,
 both from a superficial view (low detail level, IE Manager speak) as
 well as some somewhat higher level information about costs, in the
 short term/ long term, etc.
 
 Thanks
 
 bobb

Bob,
the subject line and the answers make me wonder whether you are aiming
at free and open access data or software or both?

The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) [1] has recently
released the publication [2] FLOSS in Cadastre and Land Registration -
Opportunities and Risks together with FAO. It has two initial chapters
on Free and Open-Source Software and Open-Source Software for
Geospatial Data – The Birth of OSGeo. The publication is directed at
decision makers and lacks most of the tech talk that makes those folks'
eyes glaze over immediately. It is still 7 and 9 pages to read
(coincidences) but fairly straight forward. Maybe you can take some
ideas from them when promoting the Open Source idea.

Regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://www.fig.net/commission7/index.htm
[2] http://www.fig.net/pub/fao/floss_cadastre.pdf
[3] http://openstreetmap.org/

 
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Whitebox GAT

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 10:45 -0400, John Lindsay wrote:
 Hello, 
 
 I wanted to let you know about a new open-source GIS project that I
  have initiated called Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools. Whitebox GAT
  is a user-friendly and expendable GIS with significant capabilities
  for spatial analysis. In developing Whitebox GAT I have taken a
  transparent approach to the open-source paradigm. That is, if the user
  would like to know how a particular tool's algorithm works, they need
  not download the source code and wade through the immense code base to
  find the few lines of relevant code. Instead, each tool has a 'View
  Code' button that will bring up the specific code related to the tool.
  Furthermore, they are able to convert the code into other programming
  languages. The idea is to remove some of the barriers that exist
  between the developer community and the user community. 

John, 
this project is highly interesting, also in view of recent tendencies to
transport code across the web to do things on data instead of the other
way round (good for some funny discussions in the OGC WPS working group
too...). 

 My analogy is
  that commercial software 

If I may interrupt rudely and point out that you probably mean
proprietary software. We try to use correct terminology to avoid
making people believe that Free and Open Source Software cannot be used
commercially. Just a side note...

 is like a locked library where only a few
  select individuals have the right to access the information contained
  within; most open source software packages, at least from the
  viewpoint of the user, is like a public library but there is no
  cataloging system and the books are all written in Greek; Whitebox is
  much more like the Internet. You can download Whitebox GAT from:
 
 http://www.uoguelph.ca/~hydrogeo/Whitebox/index.html
 
 I'd certainly appreciate any feedback that you may have.

As already said above, this is a highly interesting approach, thanks for
getting it started. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf 

 John Lindsay, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
 Dept. of Geography, Univ. of Guelph
 Guelph, Ont. N1G 2W1   CANADA
 Phone: (519) 824-4120 x56074
 Fax: (519) 837-2940
 Email:  jlind...@uoguelph.ca
 Department Web: www.uoguelph.ca/geography/
 Personal Web: http://www.uoguelph.ca/geography/faculty/lindsay.html
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Generalizing complex 3D vector polygon data

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Alexandre Leroux wrote:
 
 Dear list,
 
 Here's my challenge. I have 3D buildings originally in the AutoCAD
 format which are composed of hundreds of 2D polygons in 3D space.
 
 Is there any tool that can generalize 3D data?
 
 I found that GRASS GIS offers line generalization:
 http://grass.itc.it/gdp/html_grass64/v.generalize.html
 but found nothing regarding 3D generalization.
 
 My feeling is that 'GIS technology' is just not there yet. There's just
 no implemented algorithms to generalize complex 3D to less complex 3D
 data. Am I right?
 
 
 Since my team is heavily using FOSS4G, we're looking for a solution (if
 any) that would ideally be 100% FOSS4G.
 
 Thanks for any feedback,
 
 Alex

I'd check out OSSIM.

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Is the integration of FOSS4G and proprietary software good for FOSS4G?

[Arnulf Christl]

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100% support to what Daniel and Brian say.

One mission of OSGeo is to support standards development, another to
interact with all geospatial communities. Even although they have a
different take on licensing proprietary vendors are a valuable part of
the geospatial community. To alienate users who are stuck on
proprietary software for whichever reason would not help any of us.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

Daniel Morissette wrote:
 Hi Miguel,
 
 The answer depends on how you measure success. If your measure of
 success is the number of people who drop their proprietary apps in favor
 of open source packages then you may not want to build this kind of
 bridge since your best tactic may be to play the same vendor lock-in
 game as some proprietary vendors do (note I wrote some vendors and not
 all).
 
 OTOH, if you measure success by the number of happy users/customers of
 your software (as I do), then by all means, build as many bridges as
 possible. In this case it does not matter if your users continue to use
 their proprietary software in parallel with your open source package,
 what matters is that at the end of the day they could be more efficient
 in doing their work, and in the end become happier campers.
 
 A good example of this is the GDAL/OGR project which is a success (IMHO)
 in large part because the license and philosophy of the project
 encouraged proprietary vendors to use and contribute to it. As a result,
 it is in use everywhere today, and even ESRI considers it part of the
 best open source technology that it is committed to supporting
 (http://esri.com/opensource). See http://gdal.org/credits.html for a
 list of organizations who have adopted and supported the project over
 the years.
 
 My 0.02$
 
 Daniel
 
 
 
 Miguel Montesinos wrote:
 Hello,

 I throw out a question some people are debating in Spain [1 (only
 Spanish)]. Sextante has the intention (or at least have thought about
 it) of building bindings so that it can be used from proprietary
 applications, like ArcGIS.

 1) Do you think that it may avoid proprietary users to migrate to open
 solutions, as they can benefit of open-source libraries under their
 proprietary software? Besides, this give arguments to proprietary
 manufacturers because of the weakness of open-source software needing to
 run on top of proprietary ones, or to sell out their compatibility with
 FOSS4G.

 2) Do you think that it may lead proprietary users to try out and
 migrate to open source solutions due to the good impression they can
 have after using FOSS4G? Besides, this could generate incomes to improve
 FOSS4G developments, and offer alternatives to proprietary extensions,
 drivers, ...

 What is your oppinion about this tricky question?

 Best,

 [1] http://sextantegis.blogspot.com/
 -
 Miguel Montesinos
 CTO
 PRODEVELOP, S.L.
 mmontesinos [at] prodevelop [dot] es
 www.prodevelop.es

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] U.S. Department of Interior soliciting Ideas on improving business practices

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

 Hi Folks,
   The U.S Department of Interior has a website up soliciting ideas for
 improvement. Each idea gives registered users options to comment and vote
 on suggestions.  There is a suggestion posted  for the use of open source
 software, and I have just posted a suggestion for regular benchmarking of
 software ( commercial and open source)  for OGC services and processing
 large datasets ( comments welcome!) .

Doug,
thank you for this information.

One minor clarification on terminology (I will never tire): Using the
wording commercial and open source to differentiate proprietary form
free/open license models is misguiding as all Open Source software can
also be used in commercial contexts and is thus also commercial
software.

This has recently been clarified by the US Department of Defense available
in a document [1], attachment 2 on page 5, §2 a):
In almost all cases, OSS meets the definition of “commercial computer
software” and shall be given appropriate statutory preference in
accordance with 10 USC 2377 (reference (b)) (see also FAR 2.101(b),
12.000, 12.101 (reference (c)); and DFARS 212.212, and 252.227-7014(a)(1)
(reference (d))).

(I love to cite those guys, they manage to make everything look dead
serious :-)

The correct term to differentiate free and open source license models from
proprietary license is models is proprietary, and nothing but.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://cio-nii.defense.gov/sites/oss/2009OSS.pdf

   For those who might be interested in making suggestions or
 commenting
 on the existing suggestions, the website is:
 http://openinterior.ideascale.com/


 Doug

 Doug Newcomb
 USFWS
 Raleigh, NC
 919-856-4520 ext. 14 doug_newc...@fws.gov
 -

 The opinions I express are my own and are not representative of the
 official policy of the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service or Dept. of the
 Interior.   Life is too short for undocumented, proprietary data
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[OSGeo-Discuss] New OSGeo Mailing List: jQuery for geospatial development

[Arnulf Christl]

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Folks,
if you use jQuery and want to extend it for geospatial then this might
be the right place to find like minded people, add your own hack and
point to other web sites with similar development.

Feel free to join the mailing list at:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geojquery

Hack the Wiki at:
http://geojquery.org/

Tweet it, blog on it. Maybe this is a chance to get the attention of
spatially unaware developers.

Thanks to Till for starting this and to Jan for bringing it into the
Spanish speaking worlds.

Best regards,

- --
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Comparison

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 15:28 +0100, Andrea Aime wrote:
 Rafal Wawer ha scritto:
  Hi Jovi,
  For a start you can take a look at the evaluation results of CASCADOSS 
  project - you will find there also other types of FOSS4G software too.
  http://www.cascadoss.eu/en/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=16Itemid=16
   
  http://www.cascadoss.eu/en/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=16Itemid=16
   
  The evaluation is a bit out of date - valid for early 2008, but the 
  evaluation method itself may provide the clues how to look at  and 
  compare FOSS4G software projects.
 
 I am wondering if the GeoServer report was submitted to the GeoServer
 community for double checking? I've noticed a few errors in the report
 (even for beginning 2008).
 For example we had in-build testing since spring 2007, the project
 was already more than 5 years old in 2008 and so on.
 
 Cheers
 Andrea

Andrea, 
I also noticed some inconsistencies and omissions in that document. This
is the general problem with canned information that has not been passed
by the relevant communities. It would be much easier to have this type
of documents available in an editable format like a Wiki. I wonder why
OSGeo has not got around to producing something similar? It is obviously
a hard task but if we (OSGeo folks) do not manage to get it done well,
who will? 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Software Copyright ownership

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

Cleaning up an older thread... 

From what I gather from the lists there seems to be no broad opinion in
favor of making projects move their copyright under the hood of OSGeo. 

With the recent discussion of potential export restriction enforcement
by incorporated organizations incorporated in USA the the need for a
more global organization seems to be higher. I am frankly at a loss at
where such an organization would be incorporated and what it could look
like but if it existed I would very much like to support it. If anyone
has a great idea what a truly global OSGeo should look like please speak
up. 

We should spend some thought on copyright every time we admit and
evaluate projects in incubation. My personal experience shows that
having the copyright of Open Source projects completely under the hood
of a community owned organization is a good thing. Everything else is
messy. The messy bit only shows when things go wrong so lets keep
fingers crossed and as long as nothing happens we'll all be fine. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 21:34 +, Chris Puttick wrote:
 The other issue with assigning code copyrights to a US-based
  organisation is a simple one. The US has the strongest software patent
  machine and the most supportive courts (if you pick your state
  carefully ;) ).
 
 As FOSSGIS applications bite ever harder into the profits of the dominant 
 player(s), the chance of the game being changed to a legal one rather than a 
 sales and marketing one is pretty high; a fight OSGeo couldn't afford to be 
 in.
 
 Chris
 
 - Landon Blake lbl...@ksninc.com wrote:
 
  One example of the restrictions Luis is talking about is the
  prohibition
  against distributing certain cryptographic software outside of the
  US:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography
  
  Don't know that OSGeo would bump into that, but it is one example of
  a
  US specific restriction on organizations involved in software
  development.
  
  Landon
  Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
  Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
   
   
  
  -Original Message-
  From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
  [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Luis W. Sevilla
  Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 10:40 AM
  To: OSGeo Discussions
  Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Software Copyright ownership
  
  Hi,
  one thing must be taken in account, IMHO. If I'm not wrong OSGeo
  is 
  an USA foundation (is registered in the States, and must follow his 
  laws, of course. As USA maintains a commercial embargo to Cuba [1], it
  
  seems there are a lot of things in technology fields restricted to 
  American companies (and also foundations).
  
  If OSGeo will not became a more global (not so USA laws
  conditioned)
  
  institution, it doesn't seem so good the idea of giving all and every
  
  copyrights to the foundation.
  
  My two cents
 Luis
  
  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_Cuba
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] options for getting paid technical/mentoring support on foss geo applications

[Arnulf Christl]

maning sambale wrote:
 Hi,
 
 We are a non-profit research institution in the Philippines providing
 geospatial related research to local partners.  This year we are
 getting more involved with the use of several FOSS geo packages
 (mostly under OSGEO projects).

Maning,
thanks for the decision to use Open Source software. Contacting this
list is a good idea. All interested parties should feel free to contact
Maning through this list or off directly to offer their services.

 We want to assist local partners in deploying FOSS products within
 their institutions (either as a desktop or server based solutions or
 customized apps).
 
 In many cases we can get support from the numerous mailinglist.
 However, there maybe cases when we will be needing paid technical
 support or specific application customization.  In the future, we want
 to develop this capacity in house and the give back to the community.
 But for the moment, we are looking for developers or consultants who
 can help us.

You can find a list of Open Source service providers in the OSGeo
directory [1]. None of them are endorsed by OSGeo and the directory is
self maintained, but it may serve as a starting point.

 What we see is a sort of mentoring mechanism.  Our staff will be
 involved with assisting our partners develop their geospatial
 solutions.  But we may need regular mentoring/technical assistance.
 Since we will be using several geo apps (desktop, server), we need
 experts in many fields.
 
 I'm currently looking at opengeo's services and it seems to provide
 the support we need.
 http://opengeo.org/
 http://opengeo.org/products/

Please notice that although OSGeo.org sounds similar to OpenGeo.org the
two organizations have a completely different background and are not
directly related. OpenGeo is not the official service provider for OSGeo
software but offer services like any another provider listed in the
directory or elsewhere. Sorry for the potentially confusing names.

 Any other ideas/individuals/orgs who can help us?  Note that we are
 not looking for people to develop the applications for us what we need
 are technical advise as we develop the request solutions from our
 partners.
 
 Many thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Arnulf Christl.

[1] http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Poland OSGeo Chapter's members will co-organize a conference

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

On Sat, 2010-01-16 at 23:30 +0100, Tomasz.Kubik wrote:
 I am pleased to announce that:
 
 
 The OSGeo Poland Chapter is co-organizing a conference on the GIS
 applications of open source software.  The event will take place on
 May 13-14 in Wroclaw, in co-operation with the Institute of Geodesy
 and Geoinformation Science, Wroclaw University of Environmental and
 Life Sciences.
 
 Foreign guests, including the representatives of national mapping
 agencies of the European Union member states have been invited to
 deliver plenary talks.  
 
 More info: http://www.gislab.up.wroc.pl/wogis2010/
 
 
 Tomasz Kubik

Tomasz,
congratulations for having set up this conference! 

I have added the event to the OSGeo Wiki [1]. If you have more
information feel free to add it to the Wiki, especially dates for
submission (if still open) and any press releases that you publish.
Ideally you can add a short note or report after the conference is
over. 

By adding [[Category:Events]] to the bottom of the page it automatically
appears in our events list [2], after the conference please change this
to [[Category:Past Events]]. 

Thank you, 
Arnulf. 

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Open_Source_GIS_conference,_Wroclaw 
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Events

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGEO code

[Arnulf Christl]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:29:56AM +, Jo wrote:

Hi,
I apologise if this is out of topic, but I don't know where else to post
this question.
I'm implementing the OSGEO Tile Map Server

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service_Specification

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service_Specificationand I came across
a SRS named OSGEO:41001;
since I don't know this authority and code, I was wondering if it is the
same as Google Mercator (EPSG:900913).
This was also suggested to me from reading in other places:


41001 no longer has any meanng, but what we meant by it at the time is 
what we now call 900913.


Not really relevant but easy to memorize, it spells Google:
900913
googlE


For a time, this was EPSG:3785; this is now EPSG:3857.

All 4 of those (and occasionally 54004) mean essentially the same thing in
common usage.


http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SoCGDAL2Tiles#NewsuggestionsforTMSStandard

http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SoCGDAL2Tiles#NewsuggestionsforTMSStandardIf
it is the same, maybe it would be a good idea to change the code for EPSG
(update the spec), for a matter of inter operability and compatibility with
other services?
If it is not the same, I would really appreciate if you could point me to
other places where I can get more information about this SRS.
Thanks in
advance,

 best regards,

  Jo
--
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Software Copyright ownership

[Arnulf Christl]

What do folks think about software Copyright ownership? OSGeo could 
suggest that project steering committees move the Copyright of their 
software under the hood of OSGeo as GeoTools and others already did. In 
some cases the respective project steering committees might not be able 
to do such a thing because they do not own it in the first place. Is 
that a good situation?



To my knowledge (this needs verification) Apache has all its projects 
under their own license and owns the copyright for the code. Very 
straightforward. Outside of Open Source in the standards arena Google 
has given the Copyright of KML to the OGC - which is good. In 
OpenStreetMap not doing this has resulted in arguably unresolvable 
licensing problems.



Let me predict that the user community (remember 2005/11) will 
probably favor such an approach (and with big lamento) and that current 
Copyright owners of code and trademarks might be rather more reluctant.



A recent example that shows what problems can be caused by not clearly 
separating Copyright, business ownership and trademarks is MySQL. The 
company MySQL AB operated the project MySQL and sold the product 
MySQL under a dual licensing schema. Now MySQL AB (the company) is 
owned by Oracle. Who owns the copyright of the project MySQL? And what 
happens to the trademarks?


I generally do not agree with Monty[1] (twittered by James Fee) and 
believe that he has other motivations and should have taken preventive 
measures up front to avoid what is happening right now. But whatever the 
outcome of this fight it for sure has been damaging to the project.


In a response/comment from Groklaw (twittered by Paul Ramsey):
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091021164738392

And on what legal basis would anyone have authority to change the 
license, other than the copyright holder? Are you seriously suggesting 
that a regulatory body decide the license instead of the copyright 
owner? What a reckless idea.



My private opinion on this issue is pretty clear: Move your Copyright to 
OSGeo - all of it including trademarks, logos and designs. That is what 
OSGeo is there for. Get it out of corporate reach, it is none of their 
business (great analogy, hehe). Is their any advantage of keeping the 
Copyright under a private property?



What I get back from corporate users of Open Source software these days 
is the same, they would rather have the Copyright sit with a (real) 
non-profit like OSGeo than anything else.



Just a last note: This thread might grow large (these soft topics where 
everybody seems to be expert are abominable). Please do not use IANAL in 
any post, just argue straight forward to your point.



/me slowly walks off for cover


Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Fw: open access resources/Natural Earth Data Cartography 2.0

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Martin Bunch wrote:

FYI


Great resource, thanks for the link.

One slightly off topic comment on the term non-commercial further down...:


Martin J. Bunch, PhD
Associate Professor
Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
Tel: 416-736-2100 x:22630
Fax: 416-736-5679

This electronic mail (e-mail), including any attachments, is intended 
only for the recipient(s) to whom it is addressed and may contain 
information that is privileged, confidential and/or exempt from 
disclosure. No waiver of privilege, confidentiality or any other 
protection is intended by virtue of its communication by the internet. 
Any unauthorized use, dissemination or copying is strictly prohibited. 
If you have received this e-mail in error, or are not named as a 
recipient, please immediately notify the sender and destroy all copies 
of it.


-Forwarded by Martin Bunch/fs/YorkU on 12/03/2009 09:18PM -

To: CAG List cagl...@lists.uvic.ca
From: Kristopher Olds o...@geography.wisc.edu
Sent by: caglist-boun...@lists.uvic.ca
Date: 12/03/2009 08:05PM
Subject: [Caglist] open access resources/Natural Earth Data 
Cartography 2.0

Hi - Canadian geographers, with geospatial interests, might be
interested in some new open source, non-commercial resources our


The use of the term non-commercial in this context is probably meant 
to convey that the sources do not originate from a commercial project. 
It should not be confused with a restriction of use as some Creative 
Commons licenses optionally have. This data has been released to the 
Public Domain and can be used for any purpose. The web site has a 
concise terms of use page: 
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/


Thanks for this, it is the maximum possible level of freedom for data. 
Well done, well done.


Regards,
Arnulf.


faculty, staff and students (and their colleagues) have been heavily
involved in developing.

The first is Natural Earth Data, an effort to create a comprehensive
set
of freely accessible geospatial data. The effort was led over the past
six months by Nathaniel Kelso of the Washington Post and Tom Patterson
of the US National Park Service. The data is now freely available here:

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

Additional information:
http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=3173

The second is Cartography 2.0, a free online knowledge base and
e-textbook for students and professionals interested in interactive and
animated maps:
http://cartography2.org/

We hope these resources are of use to some of you.

Best wishes,

Kris



Kris Olds
Professor
Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison
550 N. Park Street, Science Hall
Madison, WI 53706
USA
Email: ko...@wisc.edu
Tel: 1-608-262-5685
GEOG Twitter: http://twitter.com/UWMadisonGeog
GlobalHigherEd: http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/
GlobalHigherEd Twitter: http://twitter.com/globalhighered
WUN Faculty Coordinator: http://www.intlstudies.wisc.edu/wun/
Co-editor, Geography Compass:
http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/geography/

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Re: [Fwd: RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] GDAL and ESRI]

[Arnulf Christl]

[...]
 HI Ravi,
 There is a nice term describing how GPL works - viral effect. If you
 touch GPL you will be GPeLd to GPL yourself.
 Unlike the flue ... there is not cure (-;
 
 Best regards:
 RAf

I suggest to not use the term viral effect but rather call it a
vaccine.

Viral effect reeks of FUD intended to make .us look like bacilli.

Vaccine is more appropriate because people generally consciously choose
to get it knowing perfectly well what they are doing. Viruses instead
are nasty and jump on you without politely asking beforehand.

It may be unconventional to fight a well known Meme like viral effect
but that does not make is any more appropriate.

:-)

Will need to add this to [[Category:Advocacy]] some day...

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [Incubator] [Fwd: Re: Request for OSGeo projects logos]

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1


Someone was a lot brighter than me long ago:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Logos_from_OSGeo_projects

Pls. update your links and add our new projects while you are at it.

Regards,

Arnulf Christl wrote:
 Folks,
 Frank is perfectly right in saying that we might have wanted to have
 people add a pointer in the OSGeo Wiki to their logo on their own
 servers. On the other hand those pages also tend to wither and go away
 (unless you are a solid rock like GDAL).
 
 What to do?  Diversity wins. I will whip up a Wiki page and add a
 pointer to both places, so jut do one of the two or both. Then we can
 follow up in a year and see which way was better.
 
 Regards, Arnulf.
 
  Original Message 
 Subject: Re: Request for OSGeo projects logos
 Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:10:39 -0500
 From: Frank Warmerdam warmer...@pobox.com
 To: arn...@osgeo.org
 References:
 5b9547fb0911250105g5453a933x4ac142702bbfb...@mail.gmail.com
 4b0cf81c.4070...@lingner.eu 4b0cfafc.7060...@osgeo.org
 4b0d610f.8050...@osgeo.org
 
 Arnulf Christl wrote:
 OSGeo Project Leads (incubating and graduated),
 please make sure that you upload your logos in high quality SVG format
 to the OSGeo Marketing SVN repository, please create a sub folder with
 the name of your project:
 http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/logo/projects/
 
 Arnulf,
 
 IMHO it would have been better to have a marketing wiki page that pointed
 to where projects kept their logo.  The current approach means someone
 from every project needs osgeo svn access, and the chances of their
 remembering to update this copy of the logo if their logo changes is very
 small.
 
 Best regards,
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

 Hi all,

 A friend of mine at a medium-sized IT company in Japan needs to convince
 his
 company management and finances to invest in FOSS4G technologies
 over the next 5 years. The company presently does a small part of
 its business using FOSS4G tools but is wondering if it should take
 a deeper plunge into the FOSS4G world.

 In order to convince the company management and finance departments, they
 need
 to produce a document with concrete data about *how companies elsewhere in
 the world
 are profiting, growing, increasing market share and the kind of clients
 that they are catering to*. Even company brochures, financial reports
 etc. would help.

 The company also wants to consider marketing broad based services for
 SDI using FOSS4G technologies and would like to know market potential
 in other countries and region for SDI related services.

 Since a part of my Master thesis deals with business models for
 FOSS4G, I find their situation interesting and would like to help
 them to take a deeper plunge into the FOSS4G world. In order to help
 prepare a brief report for them including some statistical information
 about few of the bigger players in FOSS4G business.

 It would be great if some of the business leaders in the OSGeo community
 could
 provide me with inputs for the report. Your input will not only
 help me convince them that FOSS4G is worth it
 (I am already convinced, but need some data to support my
 claim) but also help me to understand the business models better.

 If you want to keep your inputs confidential, you are welcome
 to contact me off-list (daniele.ocuATgmail.com). Names, names of companies
 will be kept
 confidential (just call them company A,B,C etc) in the final report. Once
 the report is ready
 It will be shared it as an open document under appropriate
 CC license, if that is desired.

 The report needs to be ready in three weeks, I look forward
 for the inputs.

 Thank you in advance.

 Best regards

 Daniele


 --
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 Graduate School for Creative Cities
 http://gisws.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/gistrends

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Daniele,
working from there I have recently published draft versions of two new
papers (and weeks ago promised you to send the links) detailing Open
Source Business processes [1] and the other showing the needs that lead to
the formation of OSGeo [2]. They are more general in tone and do not give
explicit examples but maybe are a good introduction. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

[1] http://arnulf.us/Open_Source_Business_Models
[2] http://arnulf.us/History_and_Mission_of_OSGeo

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Events OSGeo India

[Arnulf Christl]

Ravi wrote:

Hi,
reporting a couple of inspiring events.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User_talk:Ravivundavalli

Ravi Kumar



Ravi,
thanks for the update. Doing this helps to keep track of what is going 
on in the Local Chapters, this is excellent. Hopefully other Local 
Chapters see you as a good example and start (or continue) to report as 
diligently.


We might want to tag this kind of news so that Local Chapters liaison 
officers (who we have not really activated at this time) can find 
reports easily. Maybe add a new Category to the Wiki? Ideas 
(do-ocractically implemented) are appreciated.


Regards,
Arnulf



PS:
Trying to sort through mails after longer absence from office. Please 
bear with me.


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] AGU in December (Volunteers)

[Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)]

Alex,
I will be in SF for the OGC TC meeting in the week before. Unfortunately
my flight back is on the 14th, I did not check back with the event
calendar (which one is that anyway?).

But I'd be interested in meeting with OSGeo folks to share some ideas
the weekend before - if anyone is around  interested.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

Alex Mandel schrieb:
 All,
 
 Tyler is speaking at the American Geophysical Union conference Dec
 14-18(Booth is 15-18) in San Fransisco.
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/AGU_2009
 
 I'm interested to know who is already planning to go to the AGU and
 could help at the booth occasionally?
 
 Several members of the California chapter have volunteered to run the
 booth, we're just looking to make sure we have some additional help
 before we commit the funds.
 
 We need to know before the marketing meeting tonight, 11pm PST if we
 have enough people to do the booth or not.
 
 Thanks,
 Alex
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

On Wed, September 30, 2009 18:49, Maxim Dubinin wrote:
 Hi


 Local OSGeo chapters are great, but how about existing non-OSGeo groups?
 Does OSGeo have a strategy to
 build communication with them?

 Maxim

Maxim,
yes, OSGeo's intent it to embrace and support existing organizations with
the same vision instead of being exclusive. There is a Wiki page with some
links and always happy to be updated:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Like_Minded_Regional_Organizations

Please also feel free to introduce OSGeo to organizations that have not
yet stumbled across us.

In Germany the existing Free Software Geospatial organization FOSSGIS e.V.
(then named GRASS user's group) meanwhile has become the official OSGeo
Local Chapter and we are working on the same goals and appear jointly at
conferences, trade fairs, organize hack sprints, etc. It is a lively
community and growing strong. It did take some time to work out the
details as is always the case with integrating existing organizations but
now all seem to be quite happy with it.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

 Âû ïèñàëè 30 ñåíòÿáðÿ 2009 ã., 11:03:35:


 where the cost of software licenses is far to high for the budgets
 thay have. Naturally, some of the users use cracks, but it won't be
 that easy enymore, especially in the domain of web services. OSGeo
 could support education in FOSS4G in those countries - with active
 marketing, sending information letters to the bodies responsible for
 mapping and environment.

 FW I am a big believer in folks pulling up their own socks in this
 regard. FW I am dubious about OSGeo trying to seed into countries without
 local FW advocates, but there are things we can do to help support locals
 who FW want promotional and training materials, and some introduction
 into FW international circles.


 FW Hopefully we can also provide an aura of deserved respectability
 FW for our projects that will make it easier for decision makers to take
 FW them seriously.


 OSGeo could also participate in dvelopment projects - like
 those small grants of GSDI, providing FOSS solutions, not mentioning
 European FP7 projects addressing Africa. For know the quite steep
 learning curve to get into FOSS4G is very often keeping the potential
 users away.

 FW There are things we can do, but to a large extent the benefits will
 go FW to those users who realize some investment in learning is
 worthwhile.

 Is OSGeo targeting those users now? If you look onto the map of
 registered members: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member,
 well, not everyone added himself to the map, but enyway, Africa, Asia
 and South America look quite empty (-;


 FW There are things we are doing now, including holding FOSS4G in South
 FW Africa last year, and making an effort to involve geographically
 diverse FW folks in the charter membership and board.  We have also been
 supportive FW (though perhaps we could be more so) of local chapters
 where they are FW established by local advocates.


 FW But, clearly we still have had only modest success getting folks in
 FW the developing world actively involved in the global OSGeo activities.


 FW Best regards,


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[OSGeo-Discuss] Pictures from Intergeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Hey,
Intergeo was a great success. There are a few shots available through the
osgeohackingevent2009 account (thanks again to Anne Ghisla):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/osgeohackingevent2009/sets/72157622486321366/

Regards,

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [Board] 2009 Board Election Results

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
first off a big thanks to our late directors, thanks for all the good
work! Thanks Paul for running the elections.

I will use Paul's words when I say it was a very large field of really
excellent candidates, it's a shame the board isn't bigger! I hope that you
will bring in your excellence within OSGeo all the same and I am sure that
you will have a close look on how the board is doing and let it know if it
goes astray. OSGeo is all about its members, the board should be nothing
but its formal extension.

Lets get going for a cool FOSS4G and next year.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

On Tue, September 29, 2009 16:53, Paul Ramsey wrote:
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Election_2009_Results


 Here are the final results from the voting for the open seats of the
 OSGeo Board of Directors.  There were five seats open and they have
 been filled by, in alphabetical order:

 * Chris Schmidt
 * Geoff Zeiss
 * Jeff McKenna
 * Markus Neteler (re-elected)
 * Ravi Kumar


 Thanks to everyone for running, it was a very large field of really
 excellent candidates, it's a shame the board isn't bigger.  The voting
 participation was middling at 73% and there were no tie scores to
 arbitrate.

 Your complete resulting Board is:


 * Ari Jolma
 * Arnulf Christl
 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Howard Butler
 * Markus Neteler
 * Chris Schmidt
 * Geoff Zeiss
 * Jeff McKenna
 * Ravi Kumar


 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors


 Yours,


 Paul Ramsey
 CRO 2009
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Howard,
your list looks good to me. OSGeo should focus on:
* Local Chapters
* Conferences (FOSS4G + many, many localized versions)
* Global strategic binding (that is cross project, journal, marketing, etc.)

I want to add that for me it is also a goal to limit OSGeo's growth wrt
the number of paid staff and budget. We can make good use with 100k more
for hardware, services and to have more reserves for the conferences.
But I believe that we should not let the budget grow beyond ~half a
million - not even in five years. If there is money to make then it
should be made by businesses. They in turn are welcome to sponsor OSGeo.
By supporting FOSS business development OSGeo automagically supports
itself.

Local Chapters should grow by themselves, in most cases an small initial
stub created from within OSGeo Global is enough to get going. And as
Howard said - the life of OSGeo is within the local chapters.

Regards,
Arnulf.

PS:
I wonder how many FOSS geospatial core software developers there are?
Any educated guesses? What for? Becasue those are the ones who need
OSGeo global. All the others are well served with LCs.

Howard Butler schrieb:
 
 On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
 
 Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
 the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter
 and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
 committees, projects, chapters and the board.

 It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to
 get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
 
 
 My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in
 the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
 - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make OSGeo
 real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't.
 - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and we
 start to use it our central fundraising piece.
 - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,
 benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be
 fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have been
 OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter development
 and consolidation of the conference.
 
 Howard
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Project representation at Intergeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
we have yet again invested lots to make the Open Source Park possible at
Intergeo [1] and it is starting to look really good. This year we managed
to get sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and
Technology (BMWi)[2]. The date of the Intergeo is nearing quickly but
several projects are still not represented well (or not at all). The
submission for presentation ends tomorrow but we will extend it until the
end of the week. That is Friday.

If you are keen on having your project represented please make sure that
you get someone savvy to staff our booth or have someone give a
presentation.

Feel free to spread word, a short English press release[3] text has also
been prepared.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/Intergeo_2009/Vortragsprogramm
[2] http://www.bmwi.de/English/Navigation/root.html
[3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2009#Press_Information

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Exploring Space, Time and Mind
http://arnulf.us/

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Examples of Opposition to Open Source/Open File Formats in the United States

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Landon Blake schrieb:
 It looks like I might have ruffled a few feathers with my earlier post

Landon,
please keep it up, it is advocacy at its best. As you said before, this
is the OSGeo mailing list.

Would you care to also add some of your thoughts and ideas backed up
with reference links (just link from the mailing list archives) to the
OSGeo Wiki? It provides an easy way to reference and disseminate our
activities wrt advocating Open Source Geospatial and is easily indexed
by search engines.

There is also a dedicated category in the Wiki to tag and organize pages
with explicit advocacy content. Most of the pages there are currently
focused on Open Source, Free Software and some on Business Models. Pages
related to Open Standards and Formats are still missing and would round
of the topic really well.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Advocacy
and
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Advocacy

Thanks, Arnulf.

 about the lack of support for open source software in the United States.
 I was making a generalization, and didn't mean to criticize or downplay
 the efforts of advocates and government employees that are promoting
 open source software. I hope their advocacy continues, and I will do
 what I can to support it.
 
  
 
 I thought I would take a minute to post one or two articles that
 highlight the type of opposition/attitude that I was talking about.
 
  
 
 The first one isn't directly related to geospatial software, but it is
 related to the use of open source software and open file formats by
 government agencies in the United States. It has to do with the adoption
 of ODF (the file format used by Open Office).
 
  
 
 See the section on Massachusetts in this wikipedia article:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption
 
 Here is an article about legislation proposed in 2006 to do the same
 thing in Minnesota:
 http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jht
 ml?articleID=184429732
 
  
 
 These articles are old, and there may have been updates and new legal
 decisions that I am not aware of. You could check to ODF Alliance site
 for updates:
 
  
 
 http://www.odfalliance.org/mail_list.php
 
  
 
 There is no question in my mind that Microsoft opposed the adoption of
 ODF by state governments in the United States. If you don't think this
 is true, I've got a bridge I want to sell you. :]
 
  
 
 My second example involves the Autodesk suit against the Open Design
 Alliance. You can read an article about that here:
 
 http://www.stress-free.co.nz/autodesk_sues_the_open_design_alliance
 
  
 
 Autodesk may have legitimate concerns about trademark violation, but
 I'll bet they would love to sink the Open Design Alliance ship. The
 majority of CAD data produced in the surveying/engineering arena is
 stored in the DWG format, and Autodesk knows this. Controlling that
 format and programmer's access to it is a key component of Autodesk's
 business model.
 
  
 
 It looks like the legal battle was still on as recently as July 7, 2009:
 
 http://www.opendesign.com/node/398
 
  
 
 Autodesk is certainly entitled to protect is intellectual property, but
 in my mind this is a big obstacle to data sharing among the geospatial
 communities in the US, especially as you move to the engineering/survey
 side of things.
 
  
 
 Let's not kid ourselves. There is a lot of money to be made selling
 software in the United States, and people will do their best to
 influence our legal and commercial systems to serve their own needs. One
 thing I love about open source software development is the sense of
 sharing and community. This is a definite contrast.
 
  
 
 I think OSGeo (and all of us as individual software developers) should
 be aware of this opposition to open source and open technology
 standards, and should do our best to counteract it. A lot of the general
 public doesn't understand the issues involved, or understand how
 governments funded by their tax dollars might benefit from open source
 software. We need to be the voice the people aren't going to hear from
 Autodesk or ESRI.
 
  
 
 Landon
 
  
 
 
 
 Warning:
 Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects 
 including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the 
 intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, 
 distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you 
 have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately.
 
 
 
 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Any plan for improving Service Providers?

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Jacolin Yves schrieb:
 Le Monday 03 August 2009 20:13:09 Frank Warmerdam, vous avez écrit :
 Yves Jacolin (free) wrote:
 Hello,

 Anyone could tell me it there are any plan for improving the Service
 Provider [1] ?

 For instance, add more information about service provided by each company
 like formation, support, custom dev, development of OSGeo application,
 etc.
 Yves,

 There was a plan to add indicators for service providers that had
 contributed back to the community in a variety of ways (sponsorships,
 supporting projects with developers, etc), but it never was implemented.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SPD_Prioritization

 I have tried to avoid attempting to describe services in too much detail
 within the application itself, and instead *hoped* that organizations would
 provide a landing page that gave a good description of their services
 appropriate to people coming from the service provider directory.

 Organizations provide a wide set of services, and it is hard to describe
 them consistently for searching purposes.  I think it is better to see the
 SPD as giving pointers to service providers that the searcher can then
 research more deeply using other mechanisms.

 Also, keep in mind that we do not currently vette organizations and the
 more complicated the classification the more inconsistently it is likely to
 be applied.  We already have the problems that service providers which to
 list lots of countries where they are willing to operate while we really
 want that field to indicate countries where they have existing staff on the
 ground in an office.

 Best regards,
 
 Many thanks for your answer Frank, it gives me some interesting information :)
 
 Y.
 

Yes, we should pick this up again. A suggestion was floated some time
back to mark those service providers who sponsor OSGeo with a barn
star[1]. This might also get us broader interest in sponsoring as
involved service providers can showcase their activity. It would also
allow us to reward those who do lots of in-kind contributions (e.g. SAC
folks) and thus are reluctant to pay cash to OSGeo as a sponsor.

Apart from this I guess it would be appropriate to add companies to a
map (hey, we are a bunch of mapping folks...) and maybe order the
languages and region section by name, alphabetically. Generally, would
people prefer to have the language in its own name as on the left of the
main web site or rather their English names? My preference tend to the
first.

Too many ideas, no one to do it. Sure. Thats why the SPD still looks as
it does... :-)

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars

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[OSGeo-Discuss] OGC Technical Committee Meeting protocol available Online

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

All,
the OGC [1] members meet four times a year for a one week long meeting
to work in working groups. At the fourth day the Technical Committee
meets and motions and votes on new standards, change requests, new
working groups etc. The meetings themselves are only open to members and
invited people.

In order to improve communication with other communities the OGC has
started to publish summaries of theses meetings. To make these more
accessible for OSGeo folks I have started a Wiki page with OGC News [1]
from where the latest meeting protocols are linked.

If you have further question regarding OGC feel free to ask and discuss
on the OSGeo Standards mailing list.

Best regards,
Arnulf

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_News

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[OSGeo-Discuss] OGC Technical Committee Meeting protocol available Online

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

All,
the OGC [1] members meet four times a year for a one week long meeting
to work in working groups. At the fourth day the Technical Committee
meets and motions and votes on new standards, change requests, new
working groups etc. The meetings themselves are only open to members and
invited people.

In order to improve communication with other communities the OGC has
started to publish summaries of theses meetings. To make these more
accessible for OSGeo folks I have started a Wiki page with OGC News [1]
from where the latest meeting protocols are linked.

If you have further question regarding OGC feel free to ask and discuss
on the OSGeo Standards mailing list.

Best regards,
Arnulf

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_News

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OSGeo President
http://www.osgeo.org

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Some cialis spam in the wiki...

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses schrieb:
 I've found several pages and some users spamming the wiki as you can see in 
 [1]
 
 [1] 
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchns2=1search=cialisfulltext=Advanced+search
 
 Greetings
 
 
 

Thanks for the notice, I removed the pages.

If you are interested in busting this kind of page yourself you are
invited to take on the burdens of the sysop role [1]. This list of
people can delete pages.

I just checked the user list [2] and deleted a dozen more cialis bust
enhancers. If I would gobble all that stuff my bodily dimensions would
have grown beyond any imaginable bra sizes...

Anybody aware of a way to delete the users themselves (now they only
show up as not-yet-edited pages)?

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special:ListUsersgroup=sysop
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Some cialis spam in the wiki...

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Rene A Enguehard schrieb:
 Deleting or banning the users won't stop them. What you need to do is
 look at where these people are coming from (IPs) and ban those directly.
 
 Cheers,
 René

Thanks for the tip, all blocked now.

Regards, Arnulf.


 Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) a écrit :
 Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses schrieb:
  
 I've found several pages and some users spamming the wiki as you can
 see in [1]

 [1]
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchns2=1search=cialisfulltext=Advanced+search


 Greetings



 

 Thanks for the notice, I removed the pages.

 If you are interested in busting this kind of page yourself you are
 invited to take on the burdens of the sysop role [1]. This list of
 people can delete pages.

 I just checked the user list [2] and deleted a dozen more cialis bust
 enhancers. If I would gobble all that stuff my bodily dimensions would
 have grown beyond any imaginable bra sizes...

 Anybody aware of a way to delete the users themselves (now they only
 show up as not-yet-edited pages)?

 Best regards,
 Arnulf.

 [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special:ListUsersgroup=sysop
 [2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers


   
 
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WhereGroup www.wheregroup.com

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in Salzburg, Austria - www.agit.at
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Some cialis spam in the wiki...

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses schrieb:
 ¡Hola Arnulfo!
 
 If you are interested in busting this kind of page yourself you are
 invited to take on the burdens of the sysop role [1]. This list of
 people can delete pages.

 I just checked the user list [2] and deleted a dozen more cialis bust
 enhancers. If I would gobble all that stuff my bodily dimensions would
 have grown beyond any imaginable bra sizes...
 
 Nowadays I'm following the wiki changes via RSS so usually I notice
 this kind of pages, may be tomorrow I won't attend the RSS so much,
 but in the meanwhile I can do some dirty job for the Comunity, if
 you give me the power... mhuahahaahahahaha
 
 And Arnulf, I'm not really interested about your bodily dimensions,
 for sure mate, ni de coña ;-D
 
 Bests,
 

Done, thanks for helping out!

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Park at Intergeo 2009

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
we would like to invite you to the Open Source Park at the upcoming
Intergeo 2009 Trade Fair and conference in Germany. As in the past years
OSGeo is organizing a shared presentation including a community section
for Open Source Geospatial software projects, a speaker corner and
presentation area and partner booths. There are still a few partner booth
slots available. If you are interested in participating please contact
Daniel Katzer from Hinte-Messe for further details and add me to CC as
reference.

Due to organizational learning processes we have been somewhat late in
sending around this call and apologize that we will probably not be able
to accommodate all interested parties. So please let us know quickly if
you are interested in being part of the growing Open Source business
presence at Intergeo.

Find out more about past years events at below URLs (mostly in German
language due to the more local focus of the earlier Open Source booths).
OSGeo is also seeking active participants for the set up and organization
of the community area and FOSSGIS booth duty.

Fell free to contact me directly if you need more information on the
event, community and project areas.


With best regards,
Arnulf Christl
--
President OSGeo
http://www.osgeo.org

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2006
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2007
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2008
http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/Intergeo_2009 (early planning stage)


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[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Open Source Park at Intergeo 2009

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Sorry,
forgot to add the contact at Hinte-Messe. Please contact Daniel Katzer as
per Cc: above and include me to make sure.

Best regards,
Arnulf

 Folks,
 we would like to invite you to the Open Source Park at the upcoming
 Intergeo 2009 Trade Fair and conference in Germany. As in the past years
 OSGeo is organizing a shared presentation including a community section
 for Open Source Geospatial software projects, a speaker corner and
 presentation area and partner booths. There are still a few partner booth
 slots available. If you are interested in participating please contact
 Daniel Katzer from Hinte-Messe for further details and add me to CC as
 reference.

 Due to organizational learning processes we have been somewhat late in
 sending around this call and apologize that we will probably not be able
 to accommodate all interested parties. So please let us know quickly if
 you are interested in being part of the growing Open Source business
 presence at Intergeo.

 Find out more about past years events at below URLs (mostly in German
 language due to the more local focus of the earlier Open Source booths).
 OSGeo is also seeking active participants for the set up and organization
 of the community area and FOSSGIS booth duty.

 Fell free to contact me directly if you need more information on the
 event, community and project areas.


 With best regards,
 Arnulf Christl
 --
 President OSGeo
 http://www.osgeo.org

 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2006
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2007
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Intergeo_2008
 http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/Intergeo_2009 (early planning stage)




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President OSGeo
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Wiki Upkeep - Orphaned Pages

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Jason Birch schrieb:
 Alex Mandel wrote:
 
 There should be 0 pages removed from this process, and when in 
 doubt about a link, just leave it for someone else who knows that
 topic.
 
 There are a bunch of old MapGuide links there that were migrated to
 our Trac, and could be deleted.  I can either mark these as deleted,
 or if someone gives me appropriate rights on the wiki, delete them
 myself.
 
 Jason

Jason,
I added you to the Sysop group. Take care.

Best regards,
Arnulf.
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] parsing coordinates

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

pere roca ristol schrieb:
 hi all,
 
 
 I'm developing a webapplication that let's user upload their point data and
 play with it.
 
 It currently works with lat/long in a CSV with this format (eg: *0.44, -79.9
 *) but we find users with some of these also valid and acceptable ways to
 write geographic coordinates:
 
- 40:26:46N,79:56:55W
- 40:26:46.302N 79:56:55.903W
- 40°26'21N 79°58'36W
- 40d 26' 21 N 79d 58' 36 W
- 40.446195N 79.948862W
- 40.446195, -79.948862
- 40° 26.7717, -79° 56.93172
 
 
 I'm aware that parsing and interpreting free-text coordinate descriptions is
 quite complex, maybe someone knows a script (or a remote service) that does
 a similar job?
 
 
 It would be very helpful.
 
 Thanks!
 
 
 Pere

Potentially adding to your woes you should take into account that people
mix up axis order. It is a well established traditional fight between
developers, geodesists and the rest of the world. This page [1] sums up
the main issue. If you find a script that dares to deal with this, feel
free to add it as a link to that page.

Best regards,
Arnulf.

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Axis_Order_Confusion
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] What usually your local chapter exhibit in a conference?

[Arnulf Christl]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Jacolin Yves schrieb:
 Le Tuesday 14 April 2009 22:46:13 Cameron Shorter, vous avez écrit :
 Yves,
 Have you considered using the LiveDVD instead of a USB key? I suspect it
 would be cheaper. (at ~ $2 per DVD). You can also include all the data
 and programs you suggested on the DVD as well.
 
 Hello,
 
 The usb key was a sponsor from Autodesk Fr and is useful (rewritable) for the 
 user :)
 
 But we indeed think first using a LiveDVD and I am happy that there is an 
 OSGeo project about this. However, I am not sur if it is so easy to add data 
 and documentation inside the OSGeo Live DVD or others. Am I wrong? If you can 
 redirect me to a wiki page explaining how to do :)
 
 Regards,
 
 Y.


Hi,
the USB key has the great advantage of being writable. This allows
people to carry their stuff home and continue as if nothing happened. We
are currently moving all our curriculum to work with a USB key solution.

For other purposes a DVD version will have its advantages too.

Best regards,
Arnulf.
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] meruvian program

[Arnulf Christl]

Hey Frans,
I was out of office for several weeks and only now found your mail. This sounds very interesting, I can see that you have been very aactive in the past years! Congratulations. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 


Frans Thamura wrote:

hi there
i just create a slide, still mixed indonesia and english, will create the
english soon
but you can see what am i doing here

http://www.slideshare.net/flatburger/leadership-20-982609

i am also create new program here, leadership

this is the slide

http://www.slideshare.net/flatburger/leadership-20

right now, because of arnulf training and material of mapguide, i will put a
program of GIS shortly in our program.


meruvian is non profit organization based in Indonesia, we have 8 offices
all over java island and bali island.

we work closely with goverment such as ministery of research, ministery of
education and ministery of infocom, and industry, also with gudang garam the
biggest cigarete company in indonesia, makin group the plantation company,
mitra 2000 a spare part manufacturing, and a lot of education school


i am glad if we can have more firm relationship with all of you in the
future


NB: we also exchange open education content with blender,






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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] California Chapter Held First Annual Meeting

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Landon,
cool to see lots of activity in your local chapter. I think the idea of awarding good geo data stewardship is very good and hopefully some other local chapters are interested in picking up this idea. 

The list of chapter members who are willing to serve as outreach speakers could also be extended to the international level. Do you have any suggestions of how we could organize this? 

Some questions that come up to my mind are whether people would be required to have some formal relationship with OSGeo in order to do this? What level of official endorsement would this mean for OSGeo? How can we keep this both easy to manage (not do anything) but prevent having people talk nonsense in the name of OSGeo? An informal list of speakers who are at least recognized by some other OSGeo members would probably be a good start. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 


Landon Blake wrote:

On Saturday, February 21, 2009 the California Chapter held its first
annual meeting in Davis, California. We had 10 people in attendance. (I
want to thank Alex Mandel and the other people at UC Davis for setting
up the meeting and hosting it.)

 


I wanted to share two (2) things that developed during the meeting with
everyone on the discuss list, since the ideas might be used by other
local chapters.

 


We talked about putting together a list of chapter members that would be
willing to serve as outreach speakers to other professional groups and
societies. You can view this list (which is just starting) on this wiki
page: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/California/Outreach_Speakers

 


We also decided the chapter would give an annual award to a public
agency or other organization in California that we wanted to recognize
for efforts to promote free and open access to California geodata. This
idea is still taking shape, but I think the final award will be a framed
certificate and letter. (Something that would look nice hanging on the
wall.) I hope to start the design of the letter and certificate soon, so
if others wanted to help, I'd appreciate that. The idea of the award is
to reward and encourage good geo data stewardship in California. You can
see the wiki page for the award here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/California/Geodata_Access_Award

 


Landon

 

 




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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] some post-FOSS4G thoughts

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

On Tue, October 7, 2008 22:55, Gavin Fleming wrote:
 Frank wrote:

 As an alternative to a stand-alone event, it can also be helpful to
 work with an existing GIS conference organizer to provide an open source
 track or something similar.

 We've just been approached by www.eis-africa.org who are keen to run a
 dedicated FOSS4G track at www.africagis2009.org , 26-29 Oct 2009, the
 week after FOSS4G 2009. AfricaGIS is the major GIS conference in Africa
 (e.g. 750 delegates in Pretoria in 2005). So, who's keen to make it
 happen?

 GISSA will try to run FOSS4G tracks / have FOSS4G booths at all future
 national and provincial events in SA as well.

 Gavin

Gavin,
this is excellent! Even although this might be much to ask, please make
sure that this takes place, even if you have to go in the lead again. You
will eventually find someone to help and eventually take over.

It is great to have connected with GISSA and see that they are picking up
the idea, this will help spread word on OSGeo and FOSS4G a lot.


All,
from what I have read in this thread things seem to work out the way we
hoped, that FOSS4G can actually spawn local activity and help chapters
grow. But it all takes time, so don't despair if next year your only
chance to see FOSS4G in action is in Sydney. Instead of despairing or
complaining - why don't you start your own meeting? Whatever it is -
ranging from meeting in a pub to full fledged conferences with 500+
attendees - is better than nothing. Try to not compete with FOSS4G - The
Gobal Meeting of the Tribes but complement this event, either regionally,
language-wise or by tastes of beer. The simple magic that gets you going
is to connect with your peers and then DIY. If you think that OSGeo can
help - ask for it.

And please don't stop being critical just because you might get told off
by greater minds with even better arguments. If you think something needs
to be changed then you should say so. There are already many good ideas
under way to make the global FOSS4G even more attractive for developers,
communities and suites alike in coming years and many have started off as
a comment on this list. We might also want to make FOSS4G a lot more
accessible via web with online presentations, videos, podcasts, IRC
transcriptions, and the like. Be prepared for a great show in Sydney. If
we can't manage spatial who can?

Best regards,

-- 
Arnulf Benno Christl
http://www.osgeo.org
OSGeo President
Still lingering at:
-33.9201S  +18.4237E

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] some post-FOSS4G thoughts

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

On Tue, October 7, 2008 21:16, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
 Landon Blake wrote:

 When I think about the possibility of setting up a local or regional
 conference I get a little scared about the unknowns. How do you go about
  locating conference space? Do you approach local hotels and motels
 about discount rooming rates?

 Would it be possible to have a way for the FOSS4G conference folks
 assist a chapter interested in a regional conference?

 Landon,


 Good question.  I think Arnulf raised the suggestion that it would be
 good to have some how to hold a mini-conference materials in the wiki.

 I would suggest that local/regional conference aim for a more modest
 presence than FOSS4G.  In particular look for inexpensive space to hold it.
 Often universities are cooperative in this regard if there are
 some FOSS4G friendly faculty.  Universities also often have computer labs
 available if you want to try and do some hands on workshops.

 Also, ensure you have at least 3-4 local volunteers willing to help
 make arrangements. If it all falls on one person it can be a very heavy
 load.  Ideally you would have more folks as part of a local chapter who
 would like to help.

 You will also want to be sure you have enough speakers to provide a
 useful event.  Best to get some respectible ones committed early.

 Sometimes it is helpful to arrange smaller conferences just before or
 after some other GIS event to take advantage of folks existing travel
 arrangements.  If you do this though you may need some good lead time.

 It can be helpful to have some sponsorship to fund food, facilities, and
 such.  In the OSBootCamp/GeoCamp event here in Ottawa we did not require
 attendies to register and pay (due to support for the food from sponsors,
  and the university for facilities).  The downside of that was it was
 very hard to work out how many people were likely to show up, and there
 was no attendie list for future contact.  So I'd suggest requiring
 registration, and getting contact info, even if the registration is
 relatively modest (ie. 100 local currency units).


 As an alternative to a stand-alone event, it can also be helpful to
 work with an existing GIS conference organizer to provide an open source
 track or something similar.

 Best regards,

This is all good stuff that should be added to the Wiki and get
consolidated there. Would the Conference Committee be interested in
setting up and maintaining a Wiki page on this respect? Well, lets say:
the Conference Committee should be highly prepared to set up and maintain
a Wiki page on how to organize a local meeting / conference or piggy pack
on another event.

Best regards,
Arnulf

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[OSGeo-Discuss] How to become an OSGeo member

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

All,
Markus was so kind as to update our membership pages so that finally we
should all be able to understand how to become a member. This is an
announcement to please check back and let us know whether this is actually
true.

From
http://www.osgeo.org/content/faq/getting_started.html


= Getting Started at OSGeo =

If you're new to OSGeo, here are a few things that you can do to come up
to speed quickly with the organization and start collaborating with
others.

All are welcome to participate regardless of membership status. You do not
need to be an OSGeo member to use email mailing lists, the wiki or to
contribute to any projects but we do encourage your registration.


= How to add Yourself to the Member List =

To become an OSGeo member, register yourself on the Wiki. To do this, you
will need a Wiki account, which you can get by clicking the 'log in'
button on the upper right hand corner of the Wiki[1].

For more information about using a Wiki, see the Wiki Help. After your
registration, let people know in your personal Wiki user page (your login
name in the top right of the Wiki) what you're about, and what you're
interested in. Please simply add the text [[Category: OSGeo Member]] to
your page to become auto-registered on the member list page.

Since you've read the FAQ[2], you know that everyone participating is a
member, so adding yourself to the discuss email list is the first thing to
do (which you probably already did if you are reading this :-).

If something does not make sense to you or you have a idea how to improve
please let this list know.


[1]
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Special:Userlogintype=signupreturnto=Main_Page
[2] http://www.osgeo.org/content/faq/foundation_faq.html


-- 
Arnulf Benno Christl
http://www.osgeo.org
OSGeo President
+50.7342N   +7.0707E


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[OSGeo-Discuss] Beta-test the GEospatial Applications Registry (GEAR)

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

FYI. Maybe they will appreciate some humble Open Source contributions.

==
In support of the Geospatial Line of Business, an FGDC-coordinated
activity to streamline geospatial activities across the US federal
government, a GEospatial Applications Registry (GEAR) is being
prototyped as a directory of software applications that are pertinent to
government business processes. The objective is to provide a listing
(Wiki) of software products and encourage comments (blog-style) with
evidence of implementation. Nominations of software in GEAR does not
constitute endorsement by the government, but provides an interesting
and useful way to learn about available software of all types. Software
envisioned for the GEAR include open source and commercial applications,
as well as commercial offerings. Extensions or add-ons to existing
software can be documented and clarified through a dependencies section.

Initially we expect a small number of government-originated applications
to be registered, but we are inviting the broader GIS implementer
community to help us test and build-out the content in GEAR within the
next 2-3 weeks. A typical entry should take less than 30 minutes, less
if you are fluent with the product being described.

Keep in mind that this is only Beta software in a testing phase, but we
welcome your honest and complete entries. These will get propagated into
the final GEAR deployment when it goes public in October. All entries
will be reviewed by a government team and, once approved, made visible
for search and browse. Your assistance is greatly appreciated!

The URL: http://gear.morphexchange.com
==

-- 
Arnulf Benno Christl
http://www.osgeo.org
(OSGeo Board Member)
+50.7342N   +7.0707E


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Projects at FOSS4G

[Arnulf Christl]

Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
I'm curious about how many different projects (OSGeo and others) will be 
represented at FOSS4G by speakers, workshops, etc. Rather than wade 
through the presentation listing, I thought I'd be lazy and ask here.


If you know that your project(s) are going to be represented there, 
could you drop me a note?  Just let me know in general how many folks 
from it will be there.  If there are enough people around we could 
arrange times for people to meet your project at the OSGeo booth.


It would also help to know if your project has plans to bring flyers or 
brochures to hand out at the booth.  The OSGeo Marketing Committee is 
arranging to have some overview brochures.


Also, all projects and committees are welcome to do a brief talk at the 
Annual General Meeting.[1]  It had great turnout last year and was very 
informative!  Just sign up if you want to talk or add an item to the 
list for debate/discussion during the meeting.


Tyler

[1] AGM: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meeting_2008



Tyler,
I will probably be the only one representing the Mapbender project at FOSS4G as the Intergeo runs parallel. It is a 15,000+ visitors Germany-based GIS trade fair and all and everybody in Europe seems to be going there as it is the place to spend money. As I also have to attend to a small WhereGroup booth at FOSS4G and will try to fulfill my new job as president showing up at the OSGeo booth at the same it would be just perfect if you could arrange to have the WhereGroup booth nearby. It guess it is only a banner anyway. Then I can also answer questions regarding Mapbender, give out brochures and show it live. I know this sounds like taking advantage of being president and it probably is - which is why I send it to discuss so that all can see what a mean advantage seeking business mucker I am. Hehe. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo and use of freenode for IRC

[Arnulf Christl]

On Tue, August 19, 2008 17:12, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
 On 18-Aug-08, at 9:55 PM, Dave Patton wrote:


 Has the OSGeo foundation, or any of the OSGeo projects,
 done the Group Registration with freenode?
 http://freenode.net/group_registration.shtml


 Yes, I did this a long time ago.  Our main channel #osgeo and any
 other channels starting with #osgeo- are registered to our group.  We also
 have the option to use an OSGeo cloak.  If you are a regular user and
 want to hide your hostname and show the special osgeo/ member tag
 instead, then let me know your nick and I'll request your cloak to be
 created.

 Tyler

I should read answers to mails prior to answering myself. Do you think it
makes any considerable difference whether a channel is registered? Should
we try to register them all of can we sub-register as an OSGeo project?

Best regards,
Arnulf


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The New Board to be and Global representation

[Arnulf Christl]

Mateusz Loskot wrote:

On Jun 17, 2008, at 11:45 PM, Arnulf Christl wrote:


On Fri, June 13, 2008 18:47, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:





On 13-Jun-08, at 1:26 AM, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas wrote:



Hi I can't be more agree with we should seek the best people to
represent the foundation, based on the merits and commitment with the
usual free software values, rather than a geographic representation. Of
course having elected people from all over the world should be a sign
that FOSS4G is spreading and OSGeo is getting more and more broader.


Since there are only a few open positions for board elections each
year, it will take some time to see any long term movement in
representation either way.  In addition to to merits and commitment I
would also add vision to the list of positive attributes for board
members.

One thing that I think would be useful right away would be to start a
group made up of one representative from each local chapter - a sort of
global council.  This doesn't have to be a new or separate mailing list,
but could be.  Just having a group to go to for sharing thoughts, ideas
and vision would be really valuable.  Sound good?

Tyler


Yes.

I didn't want to let this pass uncommented. But yet again I was too
elaborate and thus moved it to my emerging http://arnulf.us/Blog



Arnulf,

I'd love to syndicate your blog on the Planet OSGeo, however
I'm having troubles with getting clean and usable RSS/Atom entries :-(
Perhaps you wouldn't mind to fix it?
Certainly, my request is valid only if you would like to get syndicated :-)

Ciao
--Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org


Mateusz, 
I am flattered by your interest but that web site is still more of a personal afterthought and not really relevant to OSGeo. The standard MediaWiki RSS is no good for a blog either. If I ever get around to regularly blog useful content on OSGeo related issues I'll come back to you with a working RSS.  

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Annual General Meeting at FOSS4G

[Arnulf Christl]

Yves Jacolin wrote:

Le vendredi 27 juin 2008 19:22, Jason Birch a écrit :

I agree with the concept of lightning-talk style reports, but I think
that it was valuable having the open question/comment section at the end
for general OSGeo organizational discussion. We didn't really have that
available at any other time in the program.

Hi,

May be some people of each local chapter should be present at the OSGeo booth 
during some time to answer questions?


Y.


Yves, Paolo, All,
please sign up for the OSGeo booth in the Wiki if you can spare some time to 
represent OSGeo:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G2008_OSGeo_Booth

Tyler will not be able to be at the booth all the time and it would be great to have more people to help out so that there is always someone knowledgeable around. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Thematic Mapping Engine as Open Source?

[Arnulf Christl]

Bjorn Sandvik wrote:


Thanks for your feedback.

I'll consider the pros and cons between different licenses. I don't have 
commercial interests,

but I would like the project to be sustainable.

I've changed my mind about using SourceForge, - I agree that Google Code 
is more suitable.


Just as a side note: Google has been overly submissive to US Export Regulations and rejects requests from IPs that can be traced to a location within an country that falls under their export ban list. Unfortunately the same applies to SourceForge. 

Thus publishing your project through Google Code or SourceForge effectively prevents interested folks from joining the project if they are citizen of a nation that falls under the US Export Regulations. This also applies to people only visiting such countries. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 


Regards,
Bjørn


Christopher Schmidt wrote:

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 12:01:25AM +0100, Bjorn Sandvik wrote:
 
My plan is to release TME as an open source project under a GNU GPL 
license v3, and use SourceForge as a code repository.



Is there a strong reason behind these choices? These days, I probably
wouldnt' go with either of them, personally.

Looking back, I realize that the GPL license may well be related to the
fact that Ext itself is GPL licensed. I wrote the rest of this before I
thought of that, but I think it's valuable as a general statement for
users thinking of licensing Javascript libraries anyway. It might still
make sense, if the restriction is Ext based, the make it clear that your
library itself is licensed as $permissive_license, and combining it with
Ext makes it GPL licensed: This way, if someone were to buy an Ext
commercial license, they could still use it under more permissive terms.

If you are a commercial entity looking to make money with open source,
the GPL may well be a very good choice. Essentially, you are the only
organization that can make improvements to the code that other people
can't have -- as the copyright owner, the license doesn't apply to the
work you do. (Once you have a project built with lots of poeple's
copyright, that does change, but.) However, if your goal is to create a
toolset which is widely used, and you are less concerned about
maximizing profit from your actions, it seems possible that a less
restrictive license might make sense. (An example of a successful GPL
licensed project is ExtJS itself.)

For example, one of the things that OpenLayers users have commonly
requested is the ability to do thematic styling in the way you describe
for their data: The coveted SLD editor is a concept that has been
tossed around, literally for years. The Ext browser work that you have
done would form a perfectly suitable base -- but OpenLayers is BSD
licensed, and extensions to it are strongly encouraged to be BSD
licensed as well, for reusability.

As a result, if the work that you are doing were to be GPL licensed,
then I would not feel comfortable encouraging a user to use your code.

Part of this problem is actually specific to browsers, imho: the use of
the GPL for Javascript software is 'somewhat weird': there are few
definitions of where the lines are drawn in Javascript. (The Linux
Kernel doesn't 'pollute' complied code that runs on that platform, but
where does the line get drawn for Javascript libraries?) I'll admit that
my dislike of GPL is strong enough that I have spent much less time
investigating it; it's possible these questions are easy to answer, 
but I don't know.


Sourceforge bothers me, to some extent, but I think this might be mostly
historical; I tend to prefer Google Code these days (though, see recent
thread about Google Code blocking exports as per US Law, which 
sourceforge

may not do). I don't know if there's any real reason to use one over the
other; certainly, startup cost with Google Code was low, and you even
get a built in wiki.

Regards,
  


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[OSGeo-Discuss] Chickens, Boards and Export Restrictions

[Arnulf Christl]

All,
every now and then governance issues pop up in lists and on IRC. I will try to summarizes some of them for those of .us who do not follow all OSGeo communication that closely. 


One critique is that the board of directors does not make decisions easily and 
quickly which could be seen as a weakness (chickens) [1].

Another critique is that some members of the board block decisions due to philosophical[2] musings. It was suggested that in some cases it is better that the board take decisions even if they might be objected to by parts of the community. 

Some have argued that part of the sentiment underlying this kind of talk is a North American centric view of the world, namely this included Jo, Markus, Me, Myself and I. I for one get this feedback on a regular basis from parts of the German speaking community. This sentiment has lead to a lot of discussion within the GaV which is the existing German FOSSGIS community, a legal entity incorporated in 2001-01-18. It was felt that OSGeo (Main?, Int'l?) was too US (North American) centric in its mindset. 



What do other local communities think about this? And how do you voice your 
opinion? Do you have a legal representative within OSGeo to voice your concerns? How do 
you go about this?


I believe that some of the sentiment and philosophical musings that has lead to the Board not being very decisive in some matters is actually a good sign and shows that the board is conscious of the mission impossible she has taken on trying to represent the highly diverse community of all Geo-FOSS folks in the world. 

From my perspective OSGeo (intl, Main, HQ, ?) should try to be the meta level organizational umbrella and should thus also refrain from meddling with local issues as best it can. This includes by far and large all commercial activities. I can only foresee many unresolvable problems coming upon us if we do start to go commercial. 



Whenever we say We, we must be conscious of who We are. The danger for people steering OSGeo is to confuse Me with We. Its so easy: you only have to flip the W in We to make it turn into a Me. 

Ugh. This looks very much like a Warnock[3]. My hope is that someone will share some more insights from another perspective. I'd like the board and the NA cabal and all see that there *is* a rest of the world - and that incidentally the others are always in the majority. 



Anyway. Another triviality we need to address are export restrictions. Due to 
formal reasons OSGeo was required to incorporate[4]. It could have been Togo - 
home of one of the most active and diverse spatial communities[5]. Or it could 
have been Switzerland, one of the most neutral (soccer looser) nations or it 
could have been Canada, home of our president, ED and some of the best software 
developers OSGeo can muster and also home of our beloved elephant in a 
porcelain shop[0]. But instead, she incarnated in the US, the most backwater 
place imaginable wrt Open Source. Looking at the goals and mission of OSGeo it 
would have been more logic to incorporate on Earth but funny enough that is not 
a legal entity suitable for incorporation. It is an undisputed fact that Web 
communities are spatially unrestricted [6] If .us does not understand this - 
who on Earth ever could? From this world wide perspective US Export 
Restrictions are ridiculous and nothing but. But from a legal standp
oint - and OSGeo (Int'l, Main, US) is one of our legal incarnations - We do have to abide by these laws and need to develop a policy [7]. The good thing is that this is enough. We are not forced to enforce it by scanning IP's and similar crap. The way Open Source works makes it impossible to control. This has also been recognized by the BIS (painful insight that must have been). Plus we do not have to reinvent the wheel but can follow best practices by Apache, Debian, PostgreSQL, and the like. Therefore it will also not be required to consult lawyers. And it is not a political issue that OSGeo wants to solve for the rest of the world. Warnock. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 


[1] http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2008-06-09.log around 15:26:15
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2008-June/002555.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_Dilemma
[4] The inadvertent creation of The MapServer Foundation in Delaware, USA is 
the precedent: http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/incorporation/osgeo_certificate.pdf
[5] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
[0] 
http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=endelang=desearchLoc=0cmpType=relaxedsectHdr=onspellToler=onchinese=bothpinyin=diacriticsearch=wie+ein+Elefant+im+Porzellanladenrelink=on
[6] http://arnulf.us/Blog on TLDs and location
[7] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/US_Export_Restrictions
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Voting for new OSGeo Charter Members open until 6th June 2008

[Arnulf Christl]

+1 from Arnulf Christl to add all 18 nominees as new charter members (this
is not a motion and obviously we should not change the rules of the
process while it is running - but what the heck, if We All think it makes
sense?)

Maybe it is also time to polish up the image of the (normal, intentional
and real) OSGeo Member. The *only* thing that the Charter Member does, is
vote for new Charter Members and half of the board once a year. But it is
not possible to formally associate oneself with OGSeo as a *regular*
member. All you can do right now is create an account in the Wiki and
another one to participate in the portal, various web sites, Trac and SVN.

There is an informal process to document being an OSGeo Member in a
web-traceable, public, web 2.0, compatible, blah mash-up way at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member

It seems to pick up some speed now so please register if you feel like
it or comment on how it could be improved here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:Membership_Rules
and there:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Membership_Application
and there:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category_talk:OSGeo_Member (now in implementation)

And if you find more information elsewhere, feel free to link it.

Regards, Arnulf.

On Sun, June 1, 2008 15:31, Jeroen Ticheler wrote:
 +1 from me.
 I'm actually curious to understand what the reason is behind the
 number of new charter members. The policy says: The number of new members
 will be between 10% and one third of the existing charter membership count
 as decided by the board. Now, that means an ever increasing number even
 if the total OSGeo community would be shrinking. Shouldn't the number of
 new charter members also be related to e.g. the number of people
 subscribed to the OSGeo discuss list (or another community size
 indicator)? Ciao,
 Jeroen


 On May 31, 2008, at 5:00 AM, Dave Patton wrote:


 P Kishor wrote:

 So, on the basis of a highly scientific polling methodology, we
 have 5 for inviting all 18 nominated to become Charter Members and 2
 for leaving 3 behind. There is some logic in sticking with the program,
 but programs have to be malleable and changeable with the times and
 situation. 15 is as arbitrary a number as 18. My choosing 15 out of
 the list is going to 100% irrational and arbitrary.


 3 is as arbitrary a number as 4, or 5, or 6.
 So what would happen if there were 19 nominations,
 or 20 or 21  Changing the policy may be appropriate, but not
 during the process. For example, knowing that the 'magic number' is 15,
 some people might have decided not to make further nominations on seeing
 a list of 18 well qualified nominees, but may have made a different
 choice had they known the 'magic number' could be changed.

 --
 Dave Patton
 CIS Canadian Information Systems
 Victoria, B.C.


 Degree Confluence Project:
 Canadian Coordinator
 Technical Coordinator
 http://www.confluence.org/


 OSGeo FOSS4G2007 conference:
 Workshop Committee Chair
 Conference Committee member
 http://www.foss4g2007.org/


 Personal website:
 Maps, GPS, etc.
 http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/
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-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.wheregroup.com

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