Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Seconding Board Member Nominations

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Mateusz Loskot mate...@loskot.net wrote:
 Hi,

 Can someone explain me what is this Seconded by
 and Support by feature listed next to the Board nominations [1]?
 Is this an element of any formal procedure or it's some kind of elevator 
 pitch?

 [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Member_Nominations_2012

According to:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Election_Procedure

No seconder is required

The OSGeo election procedures seem a bit vague at the moment.
Comparing and contrasting with government, trade union, and even
student union elections that I've seen, which have pages and pages of
restrictions on canvassing and ballot mechanisms and publicity limits
and so on.

Last year's board member nominations just have the nomination
statement and the candidate's statement:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Member_Nominations_2011

and not a long list of 'I like him/her too' messages, which are
probably unnecessary - the candidate should stand or fall on their
reputation and statement, not how many friends they seem to have! :)

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

Do you think an atlas of beautiful maps produced with open-source
technology (software and data) could be made? Here's what I was
thinking:

 * Put out a proposal for beautiful cartography, stunning maps, and
insightful visualisations done with OpenSource applications and/or
Open Data.

 * Collect map proposals as images on a flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/osgeomaps/

 * Get enough, have a community vote/expert opinion for the best 50 or so.

 * Get high-res or vector versions of the winners.

 * Get authors to write a note for the book, explaining the software,
the techniques, and the impact of their work.

 * Edit them into a glossy colour book, publish on a publish-on-demand
site (eg lulu.com).

 * Give free copies to the authors of the top ten voted maps or maybe
all the ones included (I'll pay for these unless someone wants to
sponsor it).

 * Release the PDF under an open license. Of course.

 * Profit!! [By selling copies on lulu at a small premium for OSGeo]

I don't think the production effort is very much, I just wonder if
enough people are producing maps that will look good in A4 or larger
(we're all about the web these days, right?) and if publicity can be
sustained enough to get 50 nice maps. The timeline would be set so we
have lots of glossy copies of these sitting around for sale at FOSS4G
2013.

 Good idea? Or will we just get 45 maps which are stamen.com
watercolour backgrounds with some points pasted on? There is a
perception which I think we've all heard that Open Source GIS packages
can't do cartography, but with a little help from Inkscape I've seen
some great-looking maps on posters at conferences.

 ESRI used to (still do?) produce an Arc/Info atlas (I have a vague
memory of something A3-size in our GIS research lab 20 years ago) of
maps - surely we can do something like that now. Obviously I'm
sticking my hand up to do the work for this, my concern is purely
whether we'd get enough entries. I'd like the bar to be quite high.
Most of the work is going to be done by the mappers themselves.

Shoot.

Barry

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

Hi all,

 thanks for all the comments in the last 24 hours or so. Here's
comments on them:

 How to deal with the data property and rights, ragrding both printing or 
 spreading on the Web ?

 We'd have to get permission from the authors, but that shouldn't be a
problem. I recently edited a conference proceedings for a hundred or
so authors. Everyone just has to tick a box or email their consent and
state they have permission to give their consent.

 May be such an initiative should accept maps using OpenData or OSM only ?

 This might be over-restrictive. I wouldn't be against seeing XYZ
data (c) Megacorp Inc - used with permission on a figure if it has
been created with open-source tools or also contains some open data.

Also, some companies would be willing to help underwrite production costs in 
exchange for some small ads on the back pages, if we wanted to go that way.

 Nice idea, but initial production costs are zero with
publish-on-demand - its just the time of the editor.

 Great idea, but a physical book in today's day and age? Perhaps... That said, 
 what about

 Haha! Sadly there are still geography departments who do 'GIS' and
haven't gone all two-point-oh neogeo yet. They still have big glossy
books of maps. Of course if nobody wants a physical copy then we don't
waste money on print runs with print-on-demand. We can probably make a
nice web gallery of low-res versions somewhere too.

 http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?showforum=14

 That looks like an ideal site to look for contributions. Are you
volunteering to advertise for us on there? :)

 I reckon I'd do the book in LaTeX purely so the typography can match
the cartography. The aforementioned conference proceedings was done by
converting all the submitted Word documents into PDFs, and then
including them in LaTeX so all the other matter (contents, indices
etc) looked better than the papers :)

Okay, next steps - can I start a page on the OSgeo wiki? What do I
need to get an official OSgeo stamp of approval and use the logo?

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:49 AM, Simon Cropper
simoncrop...@fossworkflowguides.com wrote:

 I think it important however that people *do not* use Inkscape, unless
 of course it is being put up as an fosGIS package. Using Inkscape has
 come about due to the inherent deficiencies in map production in various
 packages.

 Any maps produced for such a book need to be produced solely using the
 package they are meant to be showcasing. Otherwise the resulting map is
 not representative of what can be produced using a particular GIS
 package but rather the artistic skill of the cartographer!

[ Can the people discussing Arnulf's public geospatial data committee
stuff please change their subject line and start a new thread? thx ]

 Hi Simon,

   if I was worried about having too many maps for the atlas then I'd
consider putting more restrictions on the entries. However my fear is
having too few. Plus it is indeed partly intended to show artistic
skill and as long as the work is substantially created using
open-source software then I wouldn't reject it.

 Aspects of commercial cartography are still done outside of
commercial GIS - eg by loading Windows Metafiles from a GIS into Adobe
Illustrator - and I see no reason why that workflow can't be allowed
for Open Source Cartography. I don't think Open Source GIS needs to be
Open Source GIS Plus Desktop Publishing.

 Also, we get to highlight integration between open source projects
that is facilitated by Open Standards, and those standards are going
beyond spatial standards (such as using SVG to go between Qgis and
Inkscape).


Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 2:26 PM, julia harrell julia.harr...@gmail.com wrote:

  This would make it a superior product - even if
 some of the maps aren't quite as 'pretty' as those in the ESRI map
 book :)

 Why wouldn't they be as pretty? You're exhibiting the very prejudice
I'd like to exterminate! :)

 Actually it's probably an effect caused by weight-of-numbers and
there being more professional carto types using commercial software.

Barry

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

For all those interested in the atlas project, I've started up a github site:

https://github.com/barryrowlingson/osgeoatlas

The .tex file there isn't compilable as it stands because the included
map.pdf files aren't included, they are kinda large and I didn't want
to clog the repo up with them. Maybe I could. Anyway.

In the downloads is a compiled pdf - it uses the latex-tufte style and
looks quite lovely. If only the maps were, I just did a couple of
quick print composers in Qgis as proof-of-concept. They won't make the
final cut.

Please add comments and ideas as issues on the github tracker.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] how to produce a Peirce quincuncial map?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:20 PM, G. Allegri gioha...@gmail.com wrote:
 Thanks Alex.
 I will investigate more. It's an odd projection but it has interesting
 features. Maybe I will try to implement it in proj4...

Peirce's 1879 paper is on jstor!

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2369491

The tables must have taken days of calculation...

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013

[Barry Rowlingson]

Is anyone at the upper echelons of OSGeo aware of MPE2013?

http://mpe2013.org


The mission of the MPE project is to:

* Encourage research in identifying and solving fundamental questions
about planet earth
* Encourage educators at all levels to communicate the issues related
to planet earth
* Inform the public about the essential role of the mathematical
sciences in facing the challenges to our planet


One point in one of the newsletters caught my eye:


MPE2013 received the patronage of UNESCO. This includes, in
particular, the international launching of the Mathematics of Planet
Earth Open Source Exhibition foreseen to take place in the beginning
of 2013. UNESCO had been approached on behalf of the International
Union through the Canadian and French Commissions at UNESCO. In
particular, MPE2013 will work in partnership with UNESCO for the
promotion of the MPE exhibition.


Is this on the OSGeo radar?

[Next year is also the International Year Of Statistics 2013 (plus or
minus a few months)]

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham update

[Barry Rowlingson]

Hi all,

 The local organising group of FOSS4G 2013 met in Nottingham yesterday
for our first face-to-face meeting. This was after a successful and
enjoyable OSGIS UK conference.

 One of my jobs is now to keep a semi-regular update to the OSGeo
mailing lists. You'll probably get all this info if you follow our
various twitter streams, blogs, and RSS feeds, so this is for the
mailing list fans.

 We spent the day going through assorted requirements including: venue
liaison; making sure we get enough internet; firming up timetables;
making sure we get enough internet; setting milestones; making sure we
get enough internet; discussing high-level themes; making sure we
get... you get the picture. We will have enough internet, and a great
conference.

 Edited minutes and more details will appear on the OSgeo wiki
shortly: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013

 Lots of exciting developments which I can't talk about yet - but
maybe in a few weeks!

On behalf of the Local Organising Committee,

 Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [Board] OSGeo and LocationTech

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Cameron Shorter
cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote:

 Andrew, I'd like to suggest extending your thought to suggest that
 projects can be members of OSGeo AND LocationTech rather than OSGeo
 OR LocationTech. Any reason why that wouldn't work?

 Any organisation that exists as a federation of smaller projects
should have procedures for inclusion and exclusion from the group,
whether that exclusion is at the request of the subgroup or forced
removal by the overall management. Such procedures may not have
stopped the American Civil War, but that does not make them useless.

 Such organisations may also wish to specify exclusivity in their
membership clauses, although such clauses are hard to write since at
the time of codification the other organisations may not exist, and a
wide ranging members may not also be a member of any other
organisation that the government says may be unenforcable.

 I am not a lawyer, but I did date a girl with a law degree and in
idle moments I did get through most of a book on contract law.

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] African universities on google maps

[Barry Rowlingson]

This just disturbed me:

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v6/newsworld.php?id=694668

NAIROBI, Sept 14 (BERNAMA-NNN-KBC) -- Students from more than 90
universities in 12 sub-Saharan African countries have come together
for a two-week mapping exercise to put their university campuses and
surrounding areas on Google Map.

 Are we all now shouting Why not OpenStreetMap? at our screens?
Maybe the data can be used in OSM as well, I'm not sure what TCs are
imposed on user-supplied Google Map data...

discuss.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] African universities on google maps

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Anne Ghisla a.ghi...@gmail.com wrote:

 From my understanding of Google Maps TOS
 http://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

 it is forbidden to (2b) redistribute, sublicense, rent, publish, sell,
 assign, lease, market, transfer, or otherwise make the Products or
 Content available to third parties, and (2g) use the Products to create
 a database of places or other local listings information.

 So I would say that is impossible to take the user contribted data from
 Google Maps and import them into OSM. The alternative is to do the
 mapping again in OSM...

 What's not clear is whether the user-contributed data has been
incorporated into Google Maps just like any other content (with the
collectors presumably losing rights on it) or if they've put it into
My Maps or similar, in which case one hopes they do still have
rights over it.

 I'm wondering if OSGeo and OpenStreetMap should be capitalising on
all the Apple mapping news going on now.

 Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Looking for Open-Source project inception dates for OSGeo projects

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) 
bob.basq...@ci.stpaul.mn.us wrote:

  Different strategy . . .

 ** **

 If you know when a project became Open Source, please reply here with that
 project’s year of Open Sourcing.




How about making a page on the OSGeo wiki instead of bouncing emails around?

A table of project name, project start date, OSGeo incubation date,
maturity date would seem to serve you. references to the sources of those
dates could be linked too (eg email messages, incubation discussions etc).

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham update

[Barry Rowlingson]

All the news that's fit to print from your FOSS4G 2013 committee..

The biggie is that the deal is now done with Transactions in GIS that
a number of papers from the Academic Track submissions will be
accepted into the journal for publishing. TGIS as it is known, is
an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes original
research articles, review articles, and short technical notes on the
latest advances and best practices in the spatial sciences.. The
attraction of this for academics is that published papers in
high-impact journals are what we live for. The AT Subcommittee is now
busy putting together a review team for the submissions, and also
writing the call for papers to go out soon. All this should bring in
some very strong submissions to the Academic Track of the conference.

Elsewhere, progress continues on the web site design and logo. We've
had a few logo proposals, and have settled on something that evokes
the English autumn. At the time of the conference the leaves will be
starting to turn, and Sherwood Forest will be a magnificent place to
explore if you wish to go on a chivalric quest away from the safety of
the GeoCamp - the giant marquee that will form part of the conference
location. If Robin Hood should capture you, just tell him you develop
Open Source applications and he'll set you on your way.

Other discussions have been going on about sponsorship, not having
conference bags, social trips (caves anyone?
http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/caves-of-nottingham_11.html),
getting enough internet bandwidth, and a big discussion about how to
review presentations - which I'll post about shortly.

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process

[Barry Rowlingson]

In our bid for FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham, we didn't precisely say how we
intended to select presentations for the main track of the conference.
Some discussion amongst the committee has been going on, and we think
it necessary to informally poll the community to get a feel for what
method is preferred.

Previous FOSS4Gs have not used anonymous reviews (note: the Academic
Track will be a double-blind review process, we are discussing the
main conference presentations here), and have used a blend of
committee reviews and community reviews. Note that even with a
numerical ranking system its normally still necessary to do a manual
step to get a balanced conference.

The big change we could do would be to have anonymous community
reviews. Proposals would be rated based on title and abstract only.
The arguments for this include:

 * selection is on quality of proposal rather than bigness of name
 * rating procedure can prevent up-votes from whoever has the most
followers on twitter
 * promotes inclusivity:
http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html

and against arguments include:

 * some names are big draws, and it would be disappointing to not have
someone because their abstract wasn't that exciting.
 * previous FOSS4Gs have used non-anonymous reviewing and that worked
fine. Why change it?
 * it may be hard to distil an exciting talk into an abstract without
losing the excitement.

So, as this would be quite a change for FOSS4G, what do you - the
OSGeo community at large - think? I do have a google poll nearly ready
on this, but lets have a bit of a debate here and maybe it won't even
be necessary.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Bruce Bannerman b.banner...@bom.gov.au wrote:
 Agreed.

 Well said Cameron, with the aside that there may be an interesting talk from
 a previously little known person.

 I suggest leaving this to the discretion of the LOC and interested parties
 who subscribe to that year’s FOSS4G mailing list.

 A popularity campaign is not required or wanted.

 With my statistician hat on, and not speaking as a member of the
committee, it seems that we have two processes going on - what sounds
like a good talk, and who sounds like a good speaker. Maybe we should
run two review systems - one with *just* names and not abstracts or
titles, and the other with just abstracts and no names. That would
give us a measure of who the community wanted to see at the
conference, and what the community thought were great talks unbiased
by the name. The committee would then take both these reports into
consideration for the final selection.

 My extreme statistician hat gave me another idea. For each review,
present a random speaker with a random talk abstract, and ask for a
rating on the whole package. With enough randomized reviews, it would
be possible to get a ranking for speakers and talks as well as a
correlation between speakers and talks. Perhaps we could even suggest
that if speaker A did talk C instead of talk B, more people would be
interested!

There may be ways to stop popularity-contest ballot stuffing -
reviewers could get a random subset of the presentations for review,
with no guarantee that their friend's proposal is going to be there -
and prevent them reloading the page until it appears. Or you could
present multiple random pairs of proposals and ask which of the two
you'd attend.

 Committee hat back on, I'm glad we're having this discussion.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Cameron Shorter
cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote:

 With my simple maths hat on:
 Expect 150+ abstracts. Each abstract takes say 2 mins to read, think about,
 and provide a ranking.
 Total review time = 300 minutes = 6 hours.

 Best not to complicate the review process thus increasing review time.


Agreed - and if I was presented with a big list of 150 abstracts and
150 radio buttons from -2 to +2 I'd get to about 20 before giving up.
However, a system that presented random pairs of abstracts or names
and asked simply which would you like to see?, then took a this
one/that one/dont know response (with big fat buttons to easily
click), and then presented another pair would enable reviewers to 'dip
in' and do a bit more reviewing at any time.

Its the kitten war method: http://kittenwar.com/

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Adrian Custer acus...@gmail.com wrote:

 Just picking the 'good' talks may lead the conference to once again have
 many talks about the same projects that have come to dominate and fewer
 talks from new talent.

 Therefore picking talks only on the individual merits, whether of the
 abstract, topic, or speaker, leads to a particular kind of gathering,
 geared towards past success rather than towards fostering future diversity.

 Yes, this is why the community rating is only part of the process.
The intention of it is, I think, to give the committee an idea of
community feeling for the proposals. If the top 100 community-related
proposals are all about PostGIS the committee should make some
adjustments for balance, but would at least know what the top 10 rated
PostGIS proposals were and have a PostGIS stream for them.

 Also, FOSS4G is not an Unconference...

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Seeking guidance for contributing to OSGeo.

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Akshita Tyagi akshita.m...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear Sir,

 I am willing to contribute to your organization as a developer. I have a
 prior experience in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). As a summer
 trainee under Defense Research and Development Organization, Ministry of
 Defense, India; I worked on a project titled Development of PostgreSQL to
 OpenMap interface for basic vector overlay.

 OpenMap is an open source GIS Tool that enables us to work on various set of
 map data. In order to create overlays, OpenMap GIS provides the
 functionality to create basic set of overlays which include point, line,
 polyline, polygon, splines etc. I was assigned a task to establish a
 connection between OpenMap and PostgreSQL using JDBC, with the aim of
 storing the overlays drawn on any particular layer of OpenMap along with its
 user given unique name and attributes, which may be retrieved as and when
 required.


 Kindly guide me on how I can start and make my contribution. I look forward
 to a positive response from you.

As Jody has said, individual OSgeo projects will be happy to take
contributions. The procedure is normally something like:

 1. Pick an interesting project or two from the list. I think PostGIS
would be worth considering for your PostgreSQL skills, and maybe
something Java-y if you did much java work for the JDBC thing (you
don't state your language skills).

 2. Download (binaries and source), use it, read the documentation.

 3. Join project developers mailing list. Introduce yourself, then
just lurk for a bit or read the archives to get a feel for the place.

 4. Figure out where a contribution coud be useful. Developers are
always happy to receive bug fixes, so that's a great place to start.
Check the project bug tracker, find something that looks fixable.
You'll probably at that point have to learn the project build and test
procedure. That means the first thing you'll actually fix is the build
and test procedure documentation. Documentation fixes are often as
well-received as bug fixes. Translations, too, if you speak more than
one language, are something many projects lack but are set up for.
With a little preparation this can mean a contribution to several
projects. Helping with translation isn't just a mechanical process, it
does also require some knowledge of the project to translate
correctly.

 5. Welcome!
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [Foss4g2013] Code sprints at FOSS4G 2013

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Steven Feldman shfeld...@gmail.com wrote:

 When do you want to run the code sprints? Our preference would be to provide
 facilities for the code sprints on Sunday 22nd but if there was a strong
 preference to go for the Monday we could try to secure space for that (not
 guaranteed but we could try)

 I put a few questions to the Qgis developers about this recently. The
last Qgis developers meeting involved nearly 30 people for five days.
I wonder if OSgeo projects are getting too big for one day to be
enough time to do anything...

 Of course there is nothing to stop a team hacking for the duration of
the conference, except as one of the Qgis devs mentioned, the talks
might distract the developers! And nobody wants to pay to come to the
conference if they are going to be sitting in the GeoCamp drinking
beer and working on a project most of the time.

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham update

[Barry Rowlingson]

 The big news for FOSS4G 2013 is the announcement of the sponsorship packages:

http://2013.foss4g.org/sponsorship-opportunities/

 A press release has been written and is ready to go out to press
contacts. Announcements of sponsors will surely follow.

 The logo has been refined, thanks to Naomi Gale, and is now ready for
the web site to be restyled, t-shirts to be designed, and for posting
on giant billboards across the country.

 The Quest For Wifi is progressing - contacts have been made with
technical experts at the venue and discussions are ongoing.

 Meanwhile our Academic Track leads are busying themselves with Open
Journal Systems which is the web framework we are likely to be using
for submissions and refereeing.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G NA Web Site

[Barry Rowlingson]

Not sure if you've got an issue tracker for the web site at the
moment, but the template for author pages looks broken - the sidebar
content is appearing under the main content:

http://foss4g-na.org/author/dbitner/

Nice bold graphics and hipster slab-serif font though :)

I am currently recovering from WordPress hell doing the new as yet
unreleased FOSS4G2013 web site. My sympathies are with you as I see
you also are using WordPress...


On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 1:44 PM, David William Bitner
david.bit...@gmail.com wrote:
 Landon,

 Thanks for the kind words! We're excited about the whole look/feel and look
 for it to be continued in other promotional material as well as materials at
 the conference itself. The theme was created by a local designer, Matthew
 Foster (http://myfavoritematthew.com).

 We look forward to seeing you in May!

 David
 FOSS4G North America 2013 Conference Chair


 On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Landon Blake sunburned.surve...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 I don't know who is responsible for the FOSS4G NA web site
 (http://foss4g-na.org/), which I just saw today, but it is beautiful.
 I admire whoever was responsible for the web design, and I wanted to
 acknowledge their good work on behalf of OSGeo and FOSS4G NA here.

 Landon
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

Another of the irregular updates of the conference team!

We have our first sponsors - Ordnance Survey (yes, another 'OS')
Google, Edina, MapGears, and Metaspatial have all got in with our
early-bird 10% discount sponsor deal. The rest of you have until the
end of the month, then it goes up to full rate.

Wall-of-sponsors page is here:

http://2013.foss4g.org/sponsors/

We also have our first accepted keynote speaker, a major open-source
geospatial figure - I'm not sure if its public knowledge yet, so I'll
not give any names away.

The first papers have been submitted to the Academic Track section. We
expect many more, most of which will undoubtedly come in on the last
day!

The call for presentations and workshops is nearly done, the programme
subcommittee are finalising the submissions process.

We've also started to investigate entertainment options for our
evening dinner spectacular, and I've been in touch with agents to try
and get a really top-class comedy/musical act with broad appeal to our
community. If that fails we'll give our committee chair a microphone
and make him sing karaoke.

The announcement of FOSS4G-NA's harassment policy has sparked some
discussion on the committee, and we will be producing a code of
conduct document to cover everything from harassment to dress code and
timeliness. The dress code will insist everyone brings their t-shirts
from previous FOSS4Gs!

With the countdown clock on the web site now under 8 months expect
many more exciting announcements soon.


Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [Marketing] Call for Papers for FOSS4G 2013 Academic Track

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Massimiliano Cannata
massimiliano.cann...@supsi.ch wrote:
 Dear Dr. Beher,
 apologize me for this question, but it is not clear to me if at this stage
 you are asking to submit an abstract for evaluation or a full paper for
 evaluation.

 In last years, generally I submitted an abstract, then if selected for
 presentation in academic track I where asked for a full paper,
 and then if selected I had to go trough a review process by the editors.

From the web page:


We invite academics and researchers to submit full papers in English,
of maximum 6,000 words, before the deadline of 1 February 2013.
Templates for submissions in a variety of formats can be found here,
and detailed requirements, regarding layout, formatting and the
submission process, can be found on the FOSS4G 2103 Academic Track
submission pages at http://2013.foss4g.org/ojs/


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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Call for Presentations and Workshops now open.

[Barry Rowlingson]

Hi All,

 The submission system for presentations and workshops is now live,
and links are available from here:

http://2013.foss4g.org/programme/call-for-papers/

 Note that all we need for these is a summary and a few small details
- there's no requirement for a paper at all.

Please recirculate this announcement on other appropriate mailing
lists that you might belong to. If you don't give us enough to do for
our presentation selection meeting in April, we'll just be in the pub
all the time.

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

The latest update after nearly two hours of today's webex meeting,
which featured Mark Iliffe sounding like he was in a call centre, a
dog barking somewhere, and for the first time my microphone actually
working.

First order of business was pricing - there were some fine adjustments
to the costings but the committee is still confident of running an
affordable, enjoyable conference and returning a lump of cash to OSGeo
for the greater good. The registration system will go live next week.

The final signing of the contract with the venue edges closer, and we
will have plenty of internets.

The timetable was discussed, and the days of hackathons and workshops
were sorted out. Updates will be appearing on the web site soon. Those
interested in participating in the hackathon should look out for some
Google Hangout sessions that our hackathon organisers will be
publicising soon to get your ideas on what should be hacked on.

The deadline for academic track papers has been pushed back to Feb
22nd. Our reviewers will have to work a little bit quicker, but we
should still be on track for publications by the conference start.

We now have 19 sponsors, paid up and displayed on the wall of sponsors
on the web page. Slashgeo is our single media partner sponsor at this
stage. Please direct potential sponsors to our site, 2013.foss4g.org

We are happy to announce Paul Ramsey, the Co-founder of PostGIS, as
our first confirmed keynote speaker. Perhaps he will tell us how many
legs that perspicacious pachyderm really has. [see:
http://www.cleverelephant.ca/index.html ].

We have some other keynote speakers almost ready to announce, but that
will have to wait...

For our next conference call in two weeks time, Steven may well be
chairing the meeting from a chairlift in between high-speed adventures
on the snow!


Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [Board] OSGeo Board Priorities

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Paolo Cavallini cavall...@faunalia.it wrote:

 On the other hand, I still have problems with annual FOSS4G, which has a cost 
 that
 scares away many top developers. IMHO (sorry to insist, I raised this point 
 earlier)
 the meeting should be free for developers (committers to OSGeo projects), and 
 more
 expensive for businessman.

Its common practice in academic circles to have one price for
academics and another for non-academics at workshops and conferences.
But then its fairly easy to confirm who is and who isn't an academic
(by requesting the info from the academic institution). FOSS4G 2013 in
Nottingham will have a number of academic bursaies for students, which
is another way to enable access to the conference.

 The problem with making FOSS4G cheaper (I think free would be too
much) for developers would be deciding who was a developer.

 Now, this could all be done by OSGeo making available a number of
developer bursaries. This would nominally come out of the profit
margin from the conference, but since it would be paid out by OSGeo it
wouldn't affect the local committee's accounting. OSGeo would then be
responsible for handling applications and deciding who gets it.

 Would anyone on the OSGeo board like to think about doing that for
FOSS4G 2013? A small number (10) of developer bursaries?

 The net cash flow should be from business to GFOSS
 promotion, not drawing from our precious developers.

  Agreed, but a lot of the developers do now work for businesses!
Which is great. We've always known that Open Source is 'Free' as in
speech, not Free as in beer, and that conference cost for a
developer who works for a business can get passed along to the
customers (indirectly, I'm not saying you invoice them for Going To
The Very Wonderful FOSS4G Nottingham Conference).

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Free Developer Slots at FOSS4G events: [was RE: FW: [Board] OSGeo Board Priorities]

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Paolo Cavallini cavall...@faunalia.it wrote:

 So how many lower-rate slots would that require? We've got 17
 official projects and 7 incubating projects according to the home
 page summary. With this year's rates (full 350 £, student 240 £)
 and only 2 developers per project it could account for a difference
 up to 110 £ * 48 = 5280 £. Not terrible after all.

 I thnk it's far less than that. Hopefully this will bring people that
 otherwise would not come, so no net cost (and a lot more value to the
 conference, and a more developer friendly attitude).

Given the recent strategic message, I don't think its in the local
FOSS4G committee's role to provide bursaries beyond the
well-established student discount - certainly not for 2013 Nottingham
anyway. If OSGEO want to do that, then they can consider it as a skim
off the conference profits. I'm sure the local committee will be glad
to point people to OSGEO bursaries from the conference web page.

 We just need to hear from OSGEO purse-holders to see if they are willing.

 I think we already have someone providing education-related
bursaries, so there's a precedent.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Robert Szczepanek
rob...@szczepanek.pl wrote:
 Hi Barry and others,

 Is Open Source Geospatial Atlas idea still alive?
 I hope so.
 Just to remind this good idea ...

 There were opinions that a printed atlas wouldn't be a worthwhile
project due to quality, cost, effort and 'print is dead we're doing
all our maps on the interwebs now' considerations.

 There should be a map exhibition at FOSS4G2013 in September, which
will include mostly online map projects and some kind of video wall of
mapping goodness. I've left the curation of this to other rmembers of
the conference team.

Barey
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

Last week's committee conference call was a bit sparse, as it was
close to Easter and various members were lucky enough to be away from
the freezing weather in the UK.

Since my last update we hit the T-6 month countdown. Things are
rapidly moving on. We are already getting registrations for the
conference - get in now for the early bird discount.

The workshop submission deadline passed and now the Workshop
Subcommittee has a job of whittling down the submissions - and there
were plenty - to make sure there's a set of high-quality, diverse
learning activities at the conference. There have been similar
workshop proposals from different groups, so there may be some
collaborative opportunities going. The team will be in touch!

Its not all work - we hope to entertain you too. We've been in
contract discussions with an agency to bring you some fun stuff to our
Gala Dinner in the GeoTent. Warning! There may be audience
participation and possibly explosions.

We're also on the verge of announcing another key sponsor.

Most importantly, the conference presentation abstract submission
deadline is the end of this week - so please reach out to all your
contacts and social networks to plug this, and give the committee a
terrific and difficult job at our face-to-face meeting in just over
two weeks time.

Submissions info here: http://2013.foss4g.org/programme/call-for-papers/

Before my next update we hope to have the community voting system
running, so prepare to vote! It's Geo For All, so its your
conference!

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Would you be concerned if the GeoServices REST API became an OGC standard?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Cameron Shorter
cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm wanting to hear whether people in the OSGeo community have strong
 opinions regarding this proposed standard, and whether we as a
 collective OSGeo community should make statements to the OGC, and voting
 OGC members, stressing our thoughts.

My current concern is that the standards documents are in a bunch of
Microsoft Word files. And a bunch of Microsoft Word files that *crash*
my current version of OpenOffice Oh the comedy of open standards
being written using non-open file formats[1]

The ironic comment of standards are great - lets have more of them
possibly applies here.

In terms of open source implementations, the google search
geoservices rest api github doesn't find much, so I suspect the open
source community is happy with its web APIs already. These guys:

https://github.com/WSDOT-GIS/Traveler-Info-GeoServices-REST

 appear to be implementing a GeoServices REST endpoint for their
system, maybe they'd be willing to refactor their code out and develop
it as a reference server implementation? But oh dear it seems to be
written in C#.

 I'm not sure what the term 'reference implementation' means here. Any
difference in behaviour between an implementation and the spec is a
bug with the implementation, yes? For that I don't think it matters if
the reference implementation is open source or a black box - that's
irrelevant to its compliance with the standard.

However, a freely-available implementation does make it easier (and in
some cases, possible) to write code that works practically. I wouldn't
like to write a GeoServices client without a server to test it
against. Without it my option is to check my client request is correct
by comparing it with the standards document (in that unreadable Word
document).  Imagine if the authors of the first web browsers hadn't
had http servers to actually test against?

 The advantages of an open source reference implementation are also
the usual advantages of open source that we've been banging on about
for years. Mismatches between open source implementations and
standards docs can be fixed in minutes and released, and users don't
have to wait six months for the next product update release, for
example.

Is there an open-source reference implementation of code to work with
every aspect of the KML file standard? The situation seems analagous -
a proprietary standard pushed to OGC and opened up.

Barry

[1] yeah this is probably wrong and MS got their file formats
certified 'open' somehow... blah blah court case blah blah ISO voting
blah blah
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

I hope none of you on this list have missed any of the big news about
FOSS4G2013 - we're trying to ramp up the publicity and if its not
getting through to OSGeo-discuss list followers then we're probably
not getting through to enough people outside it! Catch it all by
following @foss4g and RT the good stuff.

So, two weeks ago we had our second face-to-face meeting in
Nottingham. The main agenda was selecting the programme from the
proposals we had. The process for doing this was essentially to take
the top 100 ranked community-rated proposals and then see which of the
highly committee-rated proposals had been left out. They were
considered and then we did another round of seeing which high
community-rated proposals were still left out. After consideration of
multiple similar papers from multiple authors and organisations we
were left with a program which largely reflects the will of the
people via the community vote. Massive thanks to Jeff McKenna for the
community vote system. Full details of the selection process will be
(maybe already has been) published on the OSGeo wiki.

The selected proposals were tagged and published:

http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/

The Programme Team is now working hard on arranging all these talks
and other activities into a draft timetable. We anticipate some loss
due to cancellations but there should still be plenty of things to do.

The Workshop subcommittee also revealed their selected Workshops for
the pre-conference session, which will now run to two days. Beginner
workshops will run mainly on the first day to allow  AGI GeoComm
conference attendees to see the delights of Open Source options. The
provisional workshops are listed here:

http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/workshops.html

Now that people mostly know what they will be getting for their money,
we expect registrations to rise significantly. Early bird registration
is open until the end of the month.

We announced our second diamond sponsor, The Met Office - The UK's
National Weather Service. They will be hosting the Hackathon on the
17th/18th September.

The debate about what stuff to throw at delegates on arrival
continues. Its unlikely there will be conference bags, so bring
something to carry things in.

 We will be sorting out t-shirt designs, possibly by competition, shortly.

We've also now appointed a volunteer Volunteer Coordinator, Abi Page,
who will be helping organise the horde of dedicated volunteers crucial
to the success of the event.

The academic bursary programme was announced:

http://2013.foss4g.org/registration/academic-bursaries/

which gives exceptional students and early-career researchers
subsidised conference attendance, provided by EDINA's generous
sponsorship. There are a limited number of these bursaries, so please
encourage applications from your best and brightest students. Details
and eligibility are on the web site.

As usual the committee has its regular fortnightly meetings and
continues to see a fantastic FOSS4G conference appearing over the
horizon!

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 7:27 AM, andrea antonello
andrea.antone...@gmail.com wrote:

 Also I would have another wish. Is there a way to understand how the
 workshops were chosen.
 I see important projects missing, whereas several have kind of
 double or even triple workshops.
 Given the few available slots, I would have expected more differentiation.

 Would be really keen to understand the process, if there is a simple
 way to do so.

The workshop selection process was handed to our workshop subcommittee
- I've asked them to respond to these issues here on the mailing list
and personally to you two if that's necessary.

The balance looks quite good to me, where there is duplication it
seems to be different aspects of the same project - Postgis Intro and
Postgis 3d have different audiences, for example. Its possible that
other projects weren't represented in the proposals which would
explain their absence. There are a few workshops from OpenGeo, but if
you go to their website and see how much they charge for commercial
training, you might see this as us giving people the opportunity to
get some great training cheaply from some great trainers.

Anyway, our Workshop Team will address these issues later.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Peter Baumann
p.baum...@jacobs-university.de wrote:

 +1 here. I believe this should not be a Postgres event (substitute Postgres by
 your favorite), but allow to gather folks from as many domains as possible. 
 This
 would mean to give space to as many projects as possible, and I personally 
 would
 not dare to judge about one being interesting. Maybe multiple submissions 
 from
 a single project might be combined into one to leave space for the crowd?

 I think this kind of thing did happen, especially with the
presentations. If we had two similar presentations from the same
person or the same organisation in some cases we asked them to
choose-or-merge. Merging is perhaps harder with workshops since you
end up cramming in more hands-on things for people to do and leave
them bewildered.

 An additional constraint/opportunity we have with workshops is to
attract delegates from the AGI GeoComm meeting in Nottingham running
prior to FOSS4G. These may well not be open-source geo people, so we
aim to schedule introductory workshops on the first day so that some
of those delegates can stay over. This was all in our original
proposal document, and part of our Geo For All mission.

 Maybe this - very fruitful and balanced - discussion could lead to some best
 practices for future FOSS4Gs?

 Kudos to the committees at large - it is an extermely diverse and challenging
 task to organize such a big event!

 One day we will all agree on the exact non-linear contrained
optimisation algorithm that is conference planning and the committee
will be redundant! Hooray! I'll be able to get on with my day job! :)

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] project not found in list

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Andrew Ross andrew.r...@eclipse.org wrote:

 A rising tide raises all boats.

 Apart from the boats that are tied up too tightly, in which case they
get flooded over and sink.

 Application and relevance of this analogy to the discussion is left
to the reader.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Book your FOSS4G hotel rooms quickly!

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Jo Cook joc...@astuntechnology.com wrote:

  Hi Daniel,

  There's a link from the accommodation page on the website to hotels in
 Nottingham if you want to book your own- here it is:
 http://www.experiencenottinghamshire.com/stay


 That site is very sucky. All the links in the text (boutique+spa, hostels,
canalboats, farm stays) just bounce me back to that page.

 It might be easier for us to give a link to a search on laterooms or some
other hotel booking site, or at least provide direct links to hotel,
hostel, and B+B solutions from that site, ie:


Hotels:
http://www.experiencenottinghamshire.com/stay/searchresults?sr=1cat=nottshotelrloc=onlocaddr=1loc=Nottinghamlocprox=0areaproxbands=0.5|2|5areaproxdist=0.5

B+Bs:
http://www.experiencenottinghamshire.com/stay/searchresults?sr=1cat=nottsbbpoly=321

Hostels:
http://www.experiencenottinghamshire.com/stay/hostels-and-camping

On LateRooms.com, a search for Nottingham University only returns the
Orchard Hotel, but University of Nottingham has 50 hotels listed...

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Mailmain password reminders

[Barry Rowlingson]

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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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

The conference is now 20 days away. Less than three weeks. As Jeremy
said at our last teleconference, this time next month it will be all
over...

So we are now getting things done and deadlines for various things are
looming up (and unlike Douglas Adams we do not enjoy the whooshing
sound of them flying by). The conference programme has gone to print
(changes to the programme will be reflected on the web and in an
errata sheet), signs and banners have been ordered, assorted
conference goodies which until now only existed as PDFs will become
reality.

And of course, t-shirts (both FOSS4G and Maptember) are getting
proof-checked and printed.

Excellent work from the OSGeo Live team has given us the 7.0 version,
which will be available at the conference and used for the workshops
where appropriate.

The web site now has the live programme timetable, with daily views,
and favourites that you can download as an ics calendar file. Its not
perfect (it stores faves in browser cookies instead of user accounts
for simplicity) but it works.

I recently created a version of the programme for use in an Android
app, but am struggling to find a free iOS app that allows you to
freely create and distribute conference info. I did find one, but
testing content creation is a bit tricky without an iOS device to test
it on. If anyone is keen on a bit of simple file-format reverse
engineering and has an iOS thingy to test it on, *please* get in
touch.

We're sending out regular emails to delegates and sponsors,
encouraging them to make sure they have accommodation and extras
booked. I'll not repeat all that here. We are well past our break-even
point for attendees.

I've even already written my talk presentation. That's the kind of
preparedness we have on the committee!

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

About this time next week an old blue Land Rover will roll smokily
into the car park at the EMCC in Nottingham. I will have arrived at
FOSS4G.

Steven instigated these update emails in order to keep the OSGeo
community up-to-date with conference planning after the disconnect
between the local organisation and the central OSGeo people was an
issue for the ill-fated Beijing FOSS4G-that-never-was. I like to think
the lack of communication from OSGeo central back to the local
committee saying are you doing this? is a measure of the success of
these updates, and of our communications strategy in general.

To my final update. Some last minute purchasing and arrangement for
the GeoCamp is going on. This week we should get delivery of all the
branded items such as signage and the all-important t-shirts. Some
last-minute programme changes are happening due to people having to
pull out, we are arranging replacements, and the change list is on the
web site to serve as errata from the printed programme.

So, I hope everyone coming has a safe journey and a great conference.
Don't forget your Robin Hood hats.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Looking for a one pager write up for Why Open Source is good.

[Barry Rowlingson]

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
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[OSGeo-Discuss] SSI Fellowship

[Barry Rowlingson]

The Software Sustainability Institute is a UK-based group funded by UK
Research Council money and offers fellowships to academics to promote
reproducible research and better software - one of their mottos is
Better Research Through Better Software, and I was wearing that
t-shirt for my talk at FOSS4G last week!

The Institute is funding another round of fellowships for 2014,
applications close on Friday (but its a fairly short form) and I think
a lot of their goals overlap with OSGeo goals in the open software
space. You'll get £3000 for activities such as conferences (which
could get a UK person to Portland for FOSS4G 2014!)

More details are here:

http://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme

there are some restrictions on applicants (such as they should be
working in UK-related research at an academic institute) but otherwise
the current bunch are a motley crew of assorted scientists (including
social science), non-scientists (humanities), developers and
programmers.

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] One Lecture on Open Source Geospatial

[Barry Rowlingson]

A colleague who lectures on GIS at the university asked me if I'd give
him some advice on open-source geospatial so he could at least
introduce his third year geography  environmental science
undergraduates to the idea. Thanks to the joy of site licenses the
students get to use ACME Proprietary GIS System without having to
worry about the cost.

So anyway, I offered to teach the lecture for him. What can I do in 50
minutes (and possibly a workshop) for 90 undergraduates? Here's a
brain dump:

 Compare and contrast: Free/Open/Proprietary/Closed/Commercial.
Copyright/Licensing/GPL/Copyleft etc.

 Open Standards: formation and importance - talk about the OGC,
general goodness of interoperability

 Open source development advantages/perceived disadvantages and
rejoinders to those.

 Commercialising Open Source, open source in industry.

 Open Source in Education - reproducible science, 'climategate' as a
failure of openness?

 Case Studies: Open source in government - global deployments as case studies

 Open source in the UK:  Ordnance Survey/Met Office case studies

- thats probably enough for 50 minutes. If I can do a workshop I'd
probably just get them to boot up OSGeo Live and play with QGIS for an
hour, maybe try and duplicate one of their GIS exercises from an
earlier module (load layers, buffer, overlay, report...).

Any thoughts?

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Inaugural webinar of ”Open Geospatial Science Applications” webinar series on 18th October

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Margherita Di Leo
dileomargher...@gmail.com wrote:


 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).

 The proprietary and commercial solutions are hardly reliable either!
We used Webex for FOSS4G 2013 committee meetings, and it would drop
people, or not let me use computer sound and so on. Plus it tended to
crash my browser and needed an exact JVM to work reliably.

The open source conferencingythings I know of include BigBlueButton
and OpenMeetings, the latter of which is now an Apache Foundation
project:

http://openmeetings.apache.org/

which should be something we as an open source community should get
behind in a big way.

 I've suggested projects try these things but The Powers That Be end
up going with Webex or Skype because thats what they've used in the
past, and maybe its less server setup and so on. But when I'm king of
everything...

 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.

 +1 Geo For All Except Linux Users? No thanks!

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Inaugural webinar of ”Open Geospatial Science Applications” webinar series on 18th October

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Arnulf Christl
arnulf.chri...@metaspatial.net wrote:

 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.

 As the meme goes Now you have three problems. How do I set up a
'regular radio stream'? (It sounds like I need to break into BBC
Manchester and hack into their FM transmitters!) Now everyone needs a
twitter login, a radio stream listener, and a feed from reveal.js. Oh,
and a shared whiteboard and desktop? Let's fire up that shared notepad
site that I've forgotten the name of too. And now everyone has
different usernames on things. That arnulf.christl' on the notepad is
sevenof9 on twitter and ernest.borg9 on the radio?

 Like you, I've not used OpenMeeting. I have a vague memory of trying
to install it or something like it on a fairly old server and it just
seemed to get stuck where maven just puked out its guts trying to get
all the dependencies. But that was at least two years ago.

 But these all-in-one solutions have value as all-in-one solutions,
assuming what you need is a subset of all. I'd like to see one
that Just Works (on all platforms).

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

 Or overcomplicating it :)

Barry
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[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham archiving

[Barry Rowlingson]

The material for FOSS4G 2013 for possible archiving amounts to:

 1. Static web site, including mapgallery HTML but not including
mapgallery images: 74Mb

 2. MapGallery imagery: 350Mb

 3. Basecamp archive: ???Mb - contains discussions, documents etc

 4. Google Docs: ???Mb

I'm responsible for 1 and 2. Is that too much? I could take out the
map gallery but it is quite nice. Someone else will perhaps be in
touch about 3 and 4.

Could someone on the exec kickstart the process whereby I can put
these things, if OSGeo still want them, onto storage somewhere.

I don't know if OSGeo would rather put them on a filesystem or have
everything in SVN, in which case a new SVN repo for 1 and 2 would
probably be the thing, then I'd push everything to it.

If we don't get this done by end-of-year then I doubt it will get done
afterwards.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham archiving

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Jo Cook joc...@astuntechnology.com wrote:
 There's already a repository for 2013 at
 http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/foss4g/2013/ it has some files in it (mainly bid
 documents at present that I uploaded at the start of the process). I'm
 currently wgetting the basecamp project that we were using, so I can verify
 that we will also be archiving that- however until it finishes I don't know
 how much disk space it's going to take up.

 Okay, so as long as OSGeo isn't bothered with over 300Mb of map
gallery binaries (which shouldn't change) being upped there I'll get
on with it.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham archiving

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 5:21 PM, Alex Mandel tech_...@wildintellect.com wrote:

 The size in general is not an issue. You're right that sticking that
 much in svn is usually a pain, but not if it's one time deal. This is a
 good question for the System Admin Committee to ponder though. I think
 most people would want a static clone of the site in some way to
 continue to exist, and we do have servers we can put that on.

 So under this plan you would put it in svn, and we would checkout the
 subfolder to a web server and serve up the static copy.


 That's great, because I think the ..s that SVN is
printing out right now are nearly finished...

 I didn't realise there already was an SVN for the conference, or even
that I had write access to it.

Once SVN stops spitting dots at me you should see it here:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/foss4g/2013/website/

and apart from not displaying index.html files on directories I reckon
it should be almost usable from that URL. Of course it will be happier
when stuck on an apache box with its domain name

thanks

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] MS Geospatial programs focused on FOSS4G

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 3:54 PM, maning sambale
emmanuel.samb...@gmail.com wrote:
 Dear everyone,

 A couple of colleagues are asking me this.  Are there any
 MS/scholarship GIS programs that focuses on the use of FOSS4G?

 Could you tell us what MS means here, since I first read it as
Microsoft. Do you mean Masters level (as in something like a
one-year MSc course typically taken after a first degree)? Or
something else?

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham archiving

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Anne Ghisla a.ghi...@gmail.com wrote:

 Same from me. If you find a valuable tool and wish to have an OSGeo
 instance of it, let Board/SAC know.

 I've not seen anything OpenSource that looks as good for team work as
the glossy advertising promise of OpenAtrium:

http://openatrium.com/#!/#Features

 I really want to try out an install of this at work for some
projects, especially since our IT services seem to be sidelining
SharePoint (wooohooo!)

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Gender bias in nominations

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 11:57 PM, Jeff McKenna
jmcke...@gatewaygeomatics.com wrote:
 Thank you everyone for responding (María, Jo, Anne, Madi, Andrea, mpg,
 Cameron, and Regina).  I agree that the OSGeo community is always
 welcoming, and thank you for confirming that there is no issue with the
 election/nomination process.  It is sometimes hard when I receive direct
 messages with concerns and thank you for helping me handle it.


 With my statistician hat on here, I have to point out that this is
what we call a biased sample. Not that the individuals are biased
themselves, but the group is necessarily going to be made up of, lets
say, satisfied customers.

 For every Jo there may be a dozen Janes who tried to contribute to
OSGeo, found it an unwelcoming place, and quietly left with no
complaint or fuss. Complaining about bullying and harrassment can be
very difficult, and especially in a voluntary group many will just get
on with their real jobs, not seeing any great loss to themselves in
not being part of it. This contrasts with harrassment/bullying at
work, where there is greater necessity to speak out, and, one would
hope, there are established complaints procedures and a helpful union
to argue for you.

 Personally I think the gender imbalance in tech springs from the day
baby girls are first dressed in pink and given dolls and baby boys
dressed in blue and given toy guns. I'm hopeful that society is
getting better - although slowly. Teach your children well as Crosby
Stills and Nash did sing...

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Short codes for locations

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Daniel Morissette dmorisse...@mapgears.com
 wrote:

 This sounds very much like the Natural Area Coding (NAC) system:

 http://www.nacgeo.com/

 Interesting idea in theory, but in practice this has been around for
 over a decade and hasn't really taken off, quite likely because an
 alphanumerical code is not of much more use than pure geographic
 coordinates.

 Or maybe it's like the case of rasters in a database [1] and this
 concept just needs a strong champion to sell us the idea and convince
 the world that we need it?


 Or possibly because of non-open licensing terms?

http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/licensing/

 I think I have seen some web services teaming up with What3Words which
does a similar thing except translates coords to a word triple via a
proprietary, secret, server-based algorithm. Its cutesy nature (I live at
monkey sponge gearstick) seems to appeal to many since it makes memorable
locations.

Anyhooo...




 Daniel

 [1]
 http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-users/2006-October/013569.html

 On 14-10-29 3:53 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
  Hi Doug,
  An interesting and potentially useful concept.
  It sounds like you are proposing a spatial standard. Have you approached
  the Open Geospatial Consortium about getting the standard endorsed?
 
  With regards to any code which you wish to produce and open source, I
  suggest considering bringing it under the umbrella of the Open Source
  Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
  Details about OSGeo incubation here:
  http://www.osgeo.org/incubator
 
 
  On 30/10/2014 1:08 am, Doug Rinckes wrote:
  I'm an engineer at Google, and I have just open sourced a geo project
  we've been working on for a while.
 
  I used to work on our maps, detecting missing road networks and in my
  spare time mapping roads in Papua New Guinea, Central and West Africa
  from the satellite imagery. But without street names or addresses, a
  road network isn't all that useful. People can't use it for
  directions, because they can't express where they want directions to.
  After talking with colleagues from around the world, I discovered
  that's it actually very common for streets to be unnamed.
 
  We thought that we should provide short codes that could be used like
  addresses, to give the location of homes, businesses, anything. If we
  made them usable from smartphones, we can make addresses for anywhere
  available to anyone with a smartphone pretty much immediately.
 
  We had some specific requirements, including that these address codes
  should work offline, they shouldn't spell words or include easily
  confused characters. We wanted to be able to look at two codes and
  tell if they are near each other, and estimate the direction and even
  the distance. The codes should not be generated by a single provider,
  because what do you do when they disappear? Finally, it had to be open
  sourced.
 
  Open sourcing the project was important. We wanted to allow everyone
  to evaluate it so that we don't go implementing something that turns
  out to not be useful. If it does turn out to be useful, everyone
  (including other mapping providers) should be able to implement it and
  use the codes freely.
 
  I'm pre-announcing this to a couple of geo lists today, and I'll be
  sticking around for comments and questions. The following links
  provide more information:
 
  Github project: https://github.com/google/open-location-code
  Demonstration website: http://plus.codes http://plus.codes/
  Discussion list:
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-location-code
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/open-location-code
 
  Enjoy!
 
  Doug
 
 
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  --
  Cameron Shorter,
  Software and Data Solutions Manager
  LISAsoft
  Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf,
  26 - 32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009
 
  P +61 2 9009 5000,  Wwww.lisasoft.com,  F +61 2 9009 5099
 
 
 
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 --
 Daniel Morissette
 T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
 http://www.mapgears.com/
 Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo sponsors ?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Sandro Santilli  wrote:

> The tone was "suprised" and "disappointed".
>
> Does advertising proprietary software solutions
> on OSGeo website count as "championing" for its cause ?
> I wouldn't expect that from my Open Source Compass.
>
> Or am I being misleaded by the lack of info on the net about
> the software names found on that osgeo page ?

 Proprietary software companies are big users of open source geo. Many
of them give back in different ways - some by developing open source
software alongside their proprietary code, some by patching and
contributing to community projects, and some by throwing money at us
[1].

 As long as they obey the license terms, I don't think OSGeo should
worry about taking money from PropGeo Corp. OSGeo does not suffer from
Stallmania, an uncontrollable urge to insist all software should be
free.

Barry

[1] and some (no names) by releasing code that needs their proprietary
code to work anyway, we call this "open-washing"...
http://opensource.com/business/14/12/openwashing-more-prevalent
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Renaming FOSS4G

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Marco Negretti
 wrote:

> I think that rename the conference is the worst thing that we can do:
> ten years of history trashed!

 I now regret not putting "please refrain from hyperbole" in my
original posting. It's clearly not "the worst thing we could do". It
would not "trash ten years of history".

 If the powers that be decided to change the name, I'd suggest that
"formerly FOSS4G" was prominent on the web site for a couple of years
for the new conferences. Continuity with the past is important and not
impossible after a name change. Previous conferences would still
appear as FOSS4G. No trashing of history.

 As I think the thread on OSGeo's relevance has made clear [1], change
seems to be happening - although that's a truism - but if we want to
keep up with the change going on around us then the one thing we
mustn't fear is change, no more than I fear the change in the colour
of the leaves I see outside my window. New name, new launch, new
people, new potential.

Barry

[1]  https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-September/014912.html
(note thread goes off-topic into chatter about github/trac/svn pretty
quickly...
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Renaming FOSS4G

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Paragon Corporation <l...@pcorp.us> wrote:
> We really should have just gone with GeoBonkers' Meeting back then. It
> speaks to me on so many levels.

 I'm not sure we want bonking at OSGeo events...

> In all seriousness though, I think changing the name now that everyone has
> gotten used to it and knows what it means is not a good use of anybody's
> time.

 You've missed my point by saying "everyone has gotten used to it".
Really, "everyone"? This is an introverted point of view of the OSGeo
community. Yes, you and I and everyone *on this mailing list* knows
the difference and the relationship between OSGeo and FOSS4G. But
there are people out there in geospatial who don't know either. They
are the people we have to reach out to. And its those people to whom I
hypothesise that "OSGeo" is a better branding than "FOSS4G". But I'm
not sure the effort to verify this hypothesis (surveys, focus groups)
is worth it. But my intuition is that it is.

 The pattern of calling the annual conference of organisation Foo,
"The Foo Conference" is quite well established in many fields.

> OSGEO is the Go To for all your FOSS4G needs.

As they say, "GoTo Considered Harmful"...

Barry


>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Regina
>
>
>
> From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
> [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Mateusz Loskot
> Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 3:45 PM
> To: Paul Ramsey <pram...@cleverelephant.ca>
> Cc: osgeo-discuss <discuss@lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Renaming FOSS4G
>
>
>
> On 6 Oct 2015 18:28, "Paul Ramsey" <pram...@cleverelephant.ca> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 8:12 AM, Barry Rowlingson
>> <b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>> > Okay, this is probably sticking a match under a pile of dry wood but
>> > here goes...
>> >
>> > Can we rename The FOSS4G Conference to The OSGeo Conference?
>>
>> Get off my lawn.
>>
>>
>> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/2006-September/30.html
>
> The decade passed makes it to late, init?
> Mateusz Łoskot
> (Sent from mobile)
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Renaming FOSS4G

[Barry Rowlingson]

Okay, this is probably sticking a match under a pile of dry wood but
here goes...

Can we rename The FOSS4G Conference to The OSGeo Conference?

Cons:

 1. FOSS4G is an established brand

 2. FOSS4G sidesteps the "Free" vs "Open Source" argument by including both.

Counters to those:

 1. Really? Perhaps amongst OSGeo people, but outside our sphere I
have to expand the acronym and then go on to mention OSGeo.

 2. Let's have that argument somewhere else, okay?

Pros:

 1. Puts the *Geo* visible, not tucked away as a G at the end.

 2. Gets rid of the "4G", which may have been a cool thing 2 do ten
years ago, but not now :)

 3. Removes any confusion with 4G telecoms networks.

 4. Clearly brands the conference as an OSGeo conference. Recent
discussion about the prominence and significance of OSGeo to FOSS4G
becomes moot.

 5. Is easy to explain. The OSGeo Conference is the open source
geospatial conference. See the OSGeo web site. Search for OSGeo. One
acronym to remember.

[I toyed with the idea that the conference should be called "OSGeo
Live!" and renaming the OSGeo Live operating system disc as "OSGeoOS"
but that might be a bit too much :)]

So, this is the discuss list, discuss.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Inputs invited for "The need for National level strategy for Open Principles in Geospatial"

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Jonathan Moules
 wrote:
> Hi Suchith,
>
>
> "1. How much (roughly) is the UK government (central/local government etc)
> spending in buying properitery GIS licences for the last 10 years
> (2005-2015)? Is there any plans for on savings target for the next 10 years
> ?"

> Otherwise I guess it'd be trawling through:
> https://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-report/index (maybe get a student to
> do some scraping?)
>
> Local government is harder without asking each authority individually and/or
> finding their pages then scraping them. Open Data doesn't mean Easy Data.

OpenSpending has some nice interfaces to government spending
worldwide, and you can obviously put in the name of your favourite
proprietary GIS company to see what, for example, London spent on
them:

https://openspending.org/gb-local-gla/entries?q=esri

The entire "Software Maintenance" section for London is downloadable:

https://openspending.org/gb-local-gla/expenditure-account/536510/entries#expenditure-account:536510

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] selection of points between lines

[Barry Rowlingson]

I think you should probably formulate this as a question on
gis.stackexchange.com - if you can provide some sample data, maps, and
the technologies you might be able to work with (Python, PostGIS?)
then this could be quite an interesting question there.

But I think it's off-topic for the OSGeo mailing list and needs a bit
more context.

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 11:49 AM, Subbu Sravan  wrote:
> Hi all
>  I have Line plan for a RIVER and i have some point data between
> lines.
> My goal is to select the point data between lines as txt file.
>
> The output should be like this
>
> S.NO  Line No  Point data ID
> 1 1-2x,x,x,x,x,e,t.c
>
> Waiting for valuable suggestions
>
> Thanks,
> Subhakar
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Board elections status - day 1

[Barry Rowlingson]

I've just dug my voting invite out of the Gmail spam and voted. The discuss
list has been hard to keep up with lately, so I hadn't been aware of the
impending opening of the vote.

The OSGeo calendar http://www.osgeo.org/event/ical is a bit sparse at the
moment. Perhaps we need to track important admin events in a calendar...

Barry



On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 12:09 AM, Vasile Craciunescu  wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> At the end of the first day of voting (I mean, end of the day for me, in
> Europe) we got exactly 100 votes (25.6%). I guess this is not bad. I
> encourage everyone to vote ASAP. After a number of reports, we know that
> an important number of members with Gmail e-mail accounts got the
> invitation in the spam folder. If you are using an Gmail account in your
> relation with OSGeo, please check your spam folder. On Monday I intend
> to do an effort an manually send voting links to all Gmail account that
> did note vote until that moment. You can save a lot of my time if you
> check your spam folder :)
>
> Also, if you change your work place in the last year and you are not
> using the old email address please let me know to update our records.
> Generally is not a good practice to use your work e-mail address for
> your relation with OSGeo, as jobs can change with time. For the future
> elections I will recommend the board to change the new charter members
> nomination procedure and request the person who is nominating a
> candidate to forward the nominee personal email. This will save a lot of
> time for future CRO and will make the election process more smooth.
>
> That's all for the moment. Thank you for your support for OSGeo! New
> updates in the days to follow.
>
> Best,
> Vasile
> CRO 2017
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2018 sponsorship

[Barry Rowlingson]

They've sponsored every FOSS4G Global since about 2010, except for 2015
(South Korea).

And why not? They are an Open Source company:
http://www.esri.com/software/open/open-source

They use a *lot* of open source software, so its good that they give back.
It does not earn them any power over the conference organisers and nobody
is forced to buy ArcGIS licenses.

Barry


On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:26 PM, Stefano Campus  wrote:

> Hi,
> I see ESRI is one of the sponsor of FOSS4G 2018.
> Do the OSGeo Board and Local Committee think it is appropriate?
> Our Romans ancestors used to say: 'Pecunia non olet' (money don't smell)
> but sometimes...
>
> Thank you for your reply
>
> Stefano Campus
>
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] What is Openwashing? Is there any examples in GIS Vendors?

[Barry Rowlingson]

Let's see what the main player has to say about open source:

http://www.esriuk.com/software/open/open-source

"As part of Esri’s technology and business strategy, we release and
support open-source software. We have shared 350+ open-source projects
on the developer collaboration platform GitHub. We also provide many
focused open-source solutions for customizing and extending ArcGIS."

This can be considered "open washing" because most, if not all, of the
"open-source solutions" still *require* a proprietary GIS.

Its been a while since I nosed round ESRI's github, but this appears
to not require ArcGIS:

 https://github.com/Esri/geometry-api-java

has anyone compared its performance with the JTS? -
https://github.com/locationtech/jts - assuming its functionality is
similar...

Barry
On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 10:02 AM Suchith Anand
 wrote:
>
> I came across this term OpenWashing at http://openwashing.org
>
> Openwashing: to spin a product or company as open, although it is not. 
> Derived from 'greenwashing.'
>
>
> Openwashing: n., having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for 
> marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices.
>
>
> I am trying to understand the impact of this in GIS. Is there any examples of 
> GIS Vendors using this OpenWashing?
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
> Suchith
>
> This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] okay foss4g time to move off of Flickr

[Barry Rowlingson]

Here's an idea that may be in keeping with the OSGeo ethos: Textile
Photos: https://www.textile.photos/

Its built on IPFS, a decentralised file system. https://ipfs.io/

Textile is currently in beta, and there might be a queue for accounts.
But if OSGeo wants to get in on the whole "decentralised web" thing,
this might be a way in.

Barry

On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 9:32 PM Jody Garnett  wrote:
>
> Flickr announced a 1000 picture cap 
> (https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-photos/)
>  so we may need to rescue some of our early foss4g pictures.
>
> Any good recommendations?
> --
> Jody Garnett
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Gender neutral default image on webpage

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 4:53 AM Vicky Vergara  wrote:
>
> Hello all
> I made a gender neutral default image representing an OSGeo member.
> Hope you like it.

Not sure I do like it! The head is so large compared to the body, and
the body so devoid of feature I don't immediately read it as an
abstract human representation. I'm almost reading it as a lower-case
'i'. Plus the logo is ever so slightly off-center from the circle
which is triggering my OCD tendencies a bit.

Maybe if the body was a bit larger and connected to the head. It is a
very bold and high-contrast design, and appears very large on the page
so the overall impact is quite massive. Maybe if the icons were
smaller it wouldn't matter so much, but as the page is currently my
browser shows only four people on a screen at once, and most of that
is avatars and fairly empty squares with names in. Sorry if I've
drifted off topic into the web page design now

 Happy to tweak it a bit if you've got an Inkscape SVG to share.

Barry



> On this page
> https://www.osgeo.org/community/members/
> The image is shown when the member does not have an libavatar . (work in 
> progress, on displaying the uploaded image on this page)
>
> On the profile page, the
> libavatar  takes precedence
> if not found then uploaded image
> if not found then the default image is used
>
> Regards
> Vicky
>
>
> --
>
> Georepublic UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
> Salzmannstraße 44,
> 81739 München, Germany
>
> Vicky Vergara
> Operations Research
>
> eMail: vi...@georepublic.de
> Web: https://georepublic.info
>
> Tel: +49 (089) 4161 7698-1
> Fax: +49 (089) 4161 7698-9
>
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Gender neutral default image on webpage

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 6:51 PM Jody Garnett  wrote:
>
> Your feedback makes me think we should hide entries that don’t have a photo.
>
> My thinking is part of the point of the website is to show that open source 
> is made by people. Pages and pages of placeholder photos make us look like 
> the faceless mob that protential adopters are told to fear to trust.
>
> Would rather fewer people with real faces from an outreach standpoint.

+1, or at least don't show an anonymous icon for people with no image.

Also, I don't understand why I don't have a face on that page, but I
do on my page: https://www.osgeo.org/member/rowlingson/ - so I have to
upload a profile picture in two places?

Barry


> On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 2:50 AM Tom Chadwin  wrote:
>>
>> Disagree with Barry - I do like it. However, I do think the high-contrast 
>> design means the placeholders can overpower the actual photos. I would 
>> definitely knock back the darkness of the background colour, and probably 
>> knock back the whole thing a fair bit. I'm thinking that the palette should 
>> reflect a disabled icon or menu item in a GUI, so be faded. Other than that, 
>> I really like it.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Tom
>>
>>
>> > -Original Message-
>> > From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Barry
>> > Rowlingson
>> > Sent: 22 January 2019 08:36
>> > To: Vicky Vergara
>> > Cc: OSGeo Discuss list
>> > Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Gender neutral default image on webpage
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 4:53 AM Vicky Vergara 
>> > wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Hello all
>> > > I made a gender neutral default image representing an OSGeo member.
>> > > Hope you like it.
>> >
>> > Not sure I do like it! The head is so large compared to the body, and
>> > the body so devoid of feature I don't immediately read it as an
>> > abstract human representation. I'm almost reading it as a lower-case
>> > 'i'. Plus the logo is ever so slightly off-center from the circle
>> > which is triggering my OCD tendencies a bit.
>> >
>> > Maybe if the body was a bit larger and connected to the head. It is a
>> > very bold and high-contrast design, and appears very large on the page
>> > so the overall impact is quite massive. Maybe if the icons were
>> > smaller it wouldn't matter so much, but as the page is currently my
>> > browser shows only four people on a screen at once, and most of that
>> > is avatars and fairly empty squares with names in. Sorry if I've
>> > drifted off topic into the web page design now
>> >
>> >  Happy to tweak it a bit if you've got an Inkscape SVG to share.
>> >
>> > Barry
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > > On this page
>> > > https://www.osgeo.org/community/members/
>> > > The image is shown when the member does not have an libavatar . (work
>> > in progress, on displaying the uploaded image on this page)
>> > >
>> > > On the profile page, the
>> > > libavatar  takes precedence
>> > > if not found then uploaded image
>> > > if not found then the default image is used
>> > >
>> > > Regards
>> > > Vicky
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > >
>> > > Georepublic UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
>> > > Salzmannstraße 44,
>> > > 81739 München, Germany
>> > >
>> > > Vicky Vergara
>> > > Operations Research
>> > >
>> > > eMail: vi...@georepublic.de
>> > > Web: https://georepublic.info
>> > >
>> > > Tel: +49 (089) 4161 7698-1
>> > > Fax: +49 (089) 4161 7698-9
>> > >
>> > > Commercial register: Amtsgericht München, HRB 181428
>> > > CEO: Daniel Kastl
>> > >
>> > ___
>> > Discuss mailing list
>> > Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
>> > https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>> Tom Chadwin, ICT Manager
>> Telephone: 01434 611530 Mob:
>> Web: 
>> www.northumberlandnationalpark.org.uk<http://www.northumberlandnationalpark.org.uk/>
>>
>> IMPORTANT NOTICE - Disclaimer - This communication is from Northumberland 
>> National Park Authority (NNPA).The Authority’s head office and principal 
>> place of business is Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland, NE46 1BS, 
>> United Kingdom. If you are not the 

[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G2019 Workshop survey

[Barry Rowlingson]

I'm handling workshops for FOSS4G 2019 in Edinburgh this summer - we have
more proposals than we can timetable so I want to get an idea of how these
proposals appeal to the world wide OSGeo community.

To that effect there's a little google poll here:

https://forms.gle/rq5XXNMkcY7BwVrR8

just 15 things to click "Like", "Dislike" or just leave if you're
indifferent. Plus a submit button. All on one page. No personal info
collected.

Thanks everyone.

Barry
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] [External] Re: [OSGeo-Conf] Announcement: Call for Location global FOSS4G 2023

[Barry Rowlingson via Discuss]

I think if a group of individuals[1], or several groups, want to put
forward proposals for the conference to be located in "Cyberspace"[2] then
that should not be disallowed, and then its up to the conference committee
to consider it fairly according to the criteria for selection.

Barry

[1] Not me
[2] But not "the metaverse". Just No.

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 3:45 PM Michael Smith via Discuss <
discuss@lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> This email originated outside the University. Check before clicking links
> or attachments.
>
> I would say that its probably best to think about Hybrid, as this is what
> is happening for 2022. Essentially you are both right, there are pluses and
> minuses to each. And we want to support both going forward as there isn’t
> going to be an approach that works for everyone. Future FOSS4Gs will
> probably all part virtual and in-person.
>
> Note this is my personal opinion.
>
> Mike
>
>
> --
>
> Michael Smith
> US Army Corps / Remote Sensing GIS Center
>
>
>
> On 1/12/22, 10:28 AM, "Discuss on behalf of Iván Sánchez Ortega via
> Discuss"  discuss@lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> El miércoles, 12 de enero de 2022 15:26:05 (CET) Jonathan Moules via
> Discuss
> escribió:
> >  > we really hope that FOSS4G2023 can be safely
> >  > organized in physical format.
> >
> > Why?
>
> Because we humans are social animals; and people like me, who are
> almost
> completely burnt out by not having been outside of their houses for
> nearly two
> years, could really use an in-person event to see their friends and
> their
> personal heroes.
>
> I'm not gonna attack Jonathan's points (or even reply to them, risking
> an
> episode of sealioning to erode my patience), but I want to make one of
> my own:
>
> It's good for our collective mental health. We *want* an in person
> event, we
> *hope* for it; which for me is a sign our brains have some demand for
> it, even
> if it's intangible.
>
>
> --
> Iván Sánchez Ortega 
> https://ivan.sanchezortega.es
>
>
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