Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] NASA meeting end of April
Another good place to introduce OSGeo to NASA is the ESIP Federation, where I think a number of OSGeo folks are already active. Their next meeting is in July in New Hampshire. http://esipfed.org/events (ignore the date typo, the 2007 there should be 2008...) Allan On Jan 18, 2008, at 9:40 AM, Ned Horning wrote: Greetings - I'll give the “standard process” for announcing possible OSGeo events suggested by Arnulf a try. If there is interest I'll create a Proposed Event Wiki page. NASA is holding their bi-annual Carbon Cycle and Ecosystem Joint Science Workshop April 28-May 2 in College Park Maryland: http://cce.nasa.gov/meeting_2008/ This event would be an excellent opportunity to introduce OSGeo to NASA and it's funded researchers. It will be well attended and I think this NASA community is ripe for learning more about OSGeo. This is potentially an important community since NASA is funding researchers that develop software but it's often not developed within open source communities even though there is an increase in the use of open source software. My gut feeling is that the reason for this is that many folks are not familiar with what open source is all about and they are not aware of the great resources out there. If folks are interested in pursuing this I will do what I can to facilitate OSGeo involvement. I'm not certain if I will be able to attend and even if I do it would be good to have someone involved who is more adept at advocating for OSGeo than me. All the best, Ned ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] NASA meeting end of April
Greetings - I'll give the “standard process” for announcing possible OSGeo events suggested by Arnulf a try. If there is interest I'll create a Proposed Event Wiki page. NASA is holding their bi-annual Carbon Cycle and Ecosystem Joint Science Workshop April 28-May 2 in College Park Maryland: http://cce.nasa.gov/meeting_2008/ This event would be an excellent opportunity to introduce OSGeo to NASA and it's funded researchers. It will be well attended and I think this NASA community is ripe for learning more about OSGeo. This is potentially an important community since NASA is funding researchers that develop software but it's often not developed within open source communities even though there is an increase in the use of open source software. My gut feeling is that the reason for this is that many folks are not familiar with what open source is all about and they are not aware of the great resources out there. If folks are interested in pursuing this I will do what I can to facilitate OSGeo involvement. I'm not certain if I will be able to attend and even if I do it would be good to have someone involved who is more adept at advocating for OSGeo than me. All the best, Ned ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] About OSGeo...
Hmmm, Very thoughtful reply. :c) I wasn't trying to incite a riot or anything, it just seemed a bit vague on the press release page about what was appropriate (or not). bobb Frank Warmerdam wrote: Bob Basques wrote: Whoa, So a press release can only be passed through for an existing OSGEO project? What good is that to the wider community? Or should there be another example added to the Conception section of the press Release page? That part on the bottom about costs for distribution is an interesting piece, can anyone pay to have their press release handled by OSGEO? Should anyone be able to? Bob, I'm not sure I followed the preceding discussion closely. I will say there is a difference between OSGeo passing a press release on through the OSGeo Announce mailing list (and the web site) as opposed to OSGeo actually issuing a press release to the world using the press release methodology described on the wiki. The first (passing on announcements) has a reasonably low threshold. Basically the news editors (Tyler and I current) make a judgement call on whether we feel the announcement is going to be of interest, and is supportive of OSGeo's goals and we balance it against too much frequency concerns. Major projects announcements from non-OSGeo open source geospatial projects generally pass this test though the major test is somewhat higher for non-OSGeo projects than it is for OSGeo projects. As for us issuing actual press releases, I think we should only being doing this for stuff that is very directly an OSGeo announcement. Partly this is because it uses up a bit of OSGeo karma with the press folks every time we hit them with a release. We don't want them to start dismissing our press releases because we seem to be coming out with a new one every week. And the other item is that there is a great deal of work in preparing and issuing a press release, including fairly stringent review of the release. I'm only aware of two or three press releases we have actually made it through the hoops to issue in this manner due to the effort involved. One press release in the queue (advertising the service provider directory) basically stalled and died because I couldn't pull together the effort to make it happen. So on that basis, I'm not too keen on trying to issue press releases on other projects behalfs (or even on behalf of OSGeo projects unless they are really earth shattering). I would note that the OSGeo press release guidelines can be used by anyone to issue their own press release (as long as they don't use OSGeo's logins, or issue it in our name). I succeeding in doing this a while ago for the libtiff BigTIFF upgrade effort on my own with guidance from those pages. But because that was my own effort it did not have to go through the usual OSGeo review process. All my own opinion of course. We don't really have very specific guidelines on what OSGeo will issue PRs on or pass on to the announce list. To some extent it depends on volunteers willing to do work and on the judgement of various parties. Best regards, ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] About OSGeo...
Whoa, So a press release can only be passed through for an existing OSGEO project? What good is that to the wider community? Or should there be another example added to the Conception section of the press Release page? That part on the bottom about costs for distribution is an interesting piece, can anyone pay to have their press release handled by OSGEO? Should anyone be able to? bobb Jacolin Yves wrote: Le Friday 18 January 2008 14:05:49 Arnulf Christl, vous avez écrit : Yves Jacolin wrote: Le jeudi 17 janvier 2008 19:07, Arnulf Christl a écrit : I also noticed (ok, so at this point I was going on the hunt for what else we might want to revisit) that we have no media centre links from the front page. Do we have a place where we put all our press releases? Hehe. We have press releases whenever somebody does them. Did you? Hi, The French OSGeo Press Release is here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Promotion_visiblite_fr#Presse (Marketing page) With two parts: 1- Press release : http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Presse_fr 2- Press release of software releases : http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Annonce_version_fr If you think it is better to join all press release, feel free to tell it to me. Regards, Y. Hi, looks like this needs a little more attention: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Press_Release is rather bleak. Oops, points to a dead link too. Anybody know where this should go? This one should be archived: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Press_Release_Francaise together with all the other ones from that date: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Special:Search?search=pressfulltext=Search We even have a process in place for new release: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Press_Release_Process but as far as I know we did not do much in this respect lately. Is this more appropriate for the WebCom list? There is an ld discussion of where this belongs. Time to create the Press Committee, only joking... Regards, Arnulf. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Thanks Arnulf, I was not aware of the 'Press_Release_Francaise' ;) Y. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
+1 on no advertising or announcements on this list. I agree that it may sound churlish to stop good organizations from sending good information to good people; I also agree that allowing it would diminish the usefulness of this list. If the web page of offerings is not enough, then maybe set up a separate list for that kind of thing. +1 on Arnulf's analysis of freely provided course materials. MIT started the Open Course Ware (OCW) movement a few years ago[1] and it certainly has not cut back on MIT's ability to attract customers, i.e. students. In fact, it has spawned a mini-industry of other universities putting their materials online[2]. Allan [1] http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm [2] http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=12Itemid=26 On Jan 18, 2008, at 7:58 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote: Howard Butler wrote: On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote: If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra credibility and marketing reach. Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the public domain and give them away for free for extra credibility? What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an intensive training session? Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give back our 2Ct contribution. To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts * Students * Professionals Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having course material released under an open and free license. These are: * Clients (~users, as categorized above) * Creators (for example the WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce Intellectual Property) * the FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training material (here MapServer and PostGIS). A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to explain the dependencies. 1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but unquestionably there. 2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask - Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen because universities and educational personnel are still in the late sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat it as Intellectual Property you will be the only idiot who invests keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give (FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)? 3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try and learn by themselves with freely available material because they have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] projection projects
Mike Adair wrote: I'd like to follow up on a conversation that took place at FOSS4G in Victoria regarding a gathering of the open source projection clan under the OSGeo umbrella. Frank can probably expand on the idea more, but the idea being that it would be an opportunity to build up a community around the various coordinate system projects, each of which likely wouldn't be able to sustain that on their own. My immediate motivation for bringing this up now is that I need to set up a project infrastructure for proj4js [1] (svn, trac, email, PSC, etc.). This might be a good fit as an OSGeo 'Lab' project as discussed a few months ago, either as a project on it's own or within a group of projection projects. Mike, Good timing! I am still interested in this concept though I haven't followed up on it yet. My hope was that we could treat a variety of coordinate system activities as one Project from an OSGeo point of view. This helps get us past the issue that some (all?) of them are rather small in terms of teams to justify the full OSGeo project treatment. But more importantly it would give us a forum to cooperate. Sharing things like coordinate system dictionaries, test suites and such. My hopes for participants include: proj4js proj.4 (the version of PROJ.4 that I maintain) libproj4 (the projection-only library maintained by Gerald Evenden) OSGSpatialReference (GDAL coordinate system translation classes) CS-Map (the recently open sourced library from Norm Olsen) I'm also hopeful that folks from GeoTools, and OSSIM who maintain their own projections code would participate to take advantage of the dictionaries and test suites even though their libraries wouldn't be part of the project. This is a somewhat unorthodox arrangement so I've hesitated a bit to initiate things. Also, it obviously needs agreement from several parties. :-) In the interest of moving on a bit, I've created a wiki page: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/MetaCRS I've also created a mailing list. Please join if you have an interest. http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/MetaCRS Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] About OSGeo...
Bob Basques wrote: Whoa, So a press release can only be passed through for an existing OSGEO project? What good is that to the wider community? Or should there be another example added to the Conception section of the press Release page? That part on the bottom about costs for distribution is an interesting piece, can anyone pay to have their press release handled by OSGEO? Should anyone be able to? Bob, I'm not sure I followed the preceding discussion closely. I will say there is a difference between OSGeo passing a press release on through the OSGeo Announce mailing list (and the web site) as opposed to OSGeo actually issuing a press release to the world using the press release methodology described on the wiki. The first (passing on announcements) has a reasonably low threshold. Basically the news editors (Tyler and I current) make a judgement call on whether we feel the announcement is going to be of interest, and is supportive of OSGeo's goals and we balance it against too much frequency concerns. Major projects announcements from non-OSGeo open source geospatial projects generally pass this test though the major test is somewhat higher for non-OSGeo projects than it is for OSGeo projects. As for us issuing actual press releases, I think we should only being doing this for stuff that is very directly an OSGeo announcement. Partly this is because it uses up a bit of OSGeo karma with the press folks every time we hit them with a release. We don't want them to start dismissing our press releases because we seem to be coming out with a new one every week. And the other item is that there is a great deal of work in preparing and issuing a press release, including fairly stringent review of the release. I'm only aware of two or three press releases we have actually made it through the hoops to issue in this manner due to the effort involved. One press release in the queue (advertising the service provider directory) basically stalled and died because I couldn't pull together the effort to make it happen. So on that basis, I'm not too keen on trying to issue press releases on other projects behalfs (or even on behalf of OSGeo projects unless they are really earth shattering). I would note that the OSGeo press release guidelines can be used by anyone to issue their own press release (as long as they don't use OSGeo's logins, or issue it in our name). I succeeding in doing this a while ago for the libtiff BigTIFF upgrade effort on my own with guidance from those pages. But because that was my own effort it did not have to go through the usual OSGeo review process. All my own opinion of course. We don't really have very specific guidelines on what OSGeo will issue PRs on or pass on to the announce list. To some extent it depends on volunteers willing to do work and on the judgement of various parties. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] projection projects
Mike Adair wrote: I'd like to follow up on a conversation that took place at FOSS4G in Victoria regarding a gathering of the open source projection clan under the OSGeo umbrella. Frank can probably expand on the idea more, but the idea being that it would be an opportunity to build up a community around the various coordinate system projects, each of which likely wouldn't be able to sustain that on their own. My immediate motivation for bringing this up now is that I need to set up a project infrastructure for proj4js [1] (svn, trac, email, PSC, etc.). This might be a good fit as an OSGeo 'Lab' project as discussed a few months ago, either as a project on it's own or within a group of projection projects. Comments? Mike Adair I support this idea, good thing. It will be a place to help solve the biggest problem in the spatial web world that results from the tiniest imaginable dissent. Axis order confusion. Regards, Arnulf. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
Howard Butler wrote: On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote: If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra credibility and marketing reach. Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the public domain and give them away for free for extra credibility? What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an intensive training session? Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give back our 2Ct contribution. To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts * Students * Professionals Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having course material released under an open and free license. These are: * Clients (~users, as categorized above) * Creators (for example the WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce Intellectual Property) * the FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training material (here MapServer and PostGIS). A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to explain the dependencies. 1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but unquestionably there. 2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask - Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen because universities and educational personnel are still in the late sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat it as Intellectual Property you will be the only idiot who invests keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give (FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)? 3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try and learn by themselves with freely available material because they have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us anyway. All folks from these three groups will see who created the course material and will memorize them as the experts on the topic. The GNU FDL license has a clause where invariant sections can be defined, typically this could be the front page and back cover, there you can find the authors, company logo and web site links or the creators' individual address, contacts. Link to the repository where the document is maintained, mailing list or whatever you want to advertise as important for this publication. Therefore our competitors who offer the same training courses with our material (Outrageous! My Property) always advertise us as the real real experts. Who're you gonna ask if you really wanna know? Lastly - and so important that I cannot stress this enough - obviously the Software Project is going to profit. Because the largest open gash in FOSS' outward image is missing, rotten and wrong documentation and training materials. If you
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
Allan Doyle wrote: +1 on no advertising or announcements on this list. I agree that it may sound churlish to stop good organizations from sending good information to good people; I also agree that allowing it would diminish the usefulness of this list. If the web page of offerings is not enough, then maybe set up a separate list for that kind of thing. +1 on Arnulf's analysis of freely provided course materials. MIT started the Open Course Ware (OCW) movement a few years ago[1] and it certainly has not cut back on MIT's ability to attract customers, i.e. students. In fact, it has spawned a mini-industry of other universities putting their materials online[2]. Folks, I'd note I advised OTG to drop a message about their offering to the discuss list, so they were acting in what they believed to be good faith. I still think it is appropriate for folks to briefly introduce new open source related training offerings here, but I shall avoid suggesting this in the future since there are clearly different opinions. The SPD does not give much granularity for describing things like training courses. Perhaps at some point we can have a wiki page pointing off to various training options available for OSGeo related technologies. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
