Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Lorenzo Becchi]

+1 for the Free GIS Book, still lacking development but with a lot of
potential.

lorenzo


2009/10/6 Landon Blake 

> I'm interested in working with professional associations for land
> surveyors. I would want to start with my local state association, of course.
>
> I'm not sure how much interest there is in this type of cross-organization
> collaboration.
>
> Landon
> Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
> Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:
> discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Maxim Dubinin
> Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:50 AM
> To: OSGeo Discussions
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
>
> Hi
>
> Local OSGeo chapters are great, but how about existing non-OSGeo groups?
> Does OSGeo have a strategy to
> build communication with them?
>
> Maxim
>
> Вы писали 30 сентября 2009 г., 11:03:35:
>
> >> where the cost of software licenses is far to high for the
> >> budgets thay have. Naturally, some of the users use cracks, but it won't
> be
> >> that easy enymore, especially in the domain of web services. OSGeo could
> >> support education in FOSS4G in those countries - with active marketing,
> >> sending information letters to the bodies responsible for mapping and
> >> environment.
>
> FW> I am a big believer in folks "pulling up their own socks" in this
> regard.
> FW> I am dubious about OSGeo trying to seed into countries without local
> FW> advocates, but there are things we can do to help support locals who
> FW> want promotional and training materials, and some introduction into
> FW> international circles.
>
> FW> Hopefully we can also provide an aura of deserved respectability
> FW> for our projects that will make it easier for decision makers to take
> FW> them seriously.
>
>  >> OSGeo could also participate in dvelopment projects - like
> >> those small grants of GSDI, providing FOSS solutions, not mentioning
> >> European FP7 projects addressing Africa. For know the quite steep
> learning
> >> curve to get into FOSS4G is very often keeping the potential users away.
>
> FW> There are things we can do, but to a large extent the benefits will go
> FW> to those users who realize some investment in learning is worthwhile.
>
> >> Is OSGeo targeting those users now? If you look onto the map of
> registered
> >> members: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member, well, not
> >> everyone added himself to the map, but enyway, Africa, Asia and South
> >> America look quite empty (-;
>
> FW> There are things we are doing now, including holding FOSS4G in South
> FW> Africa last year, and making an effort to involve geographically
> diverse
> FW> folks in the charter membership and board.  We have also been
> supportive
> FW> (though perhaps we could be more so) of local chapters where they are
> FW> established by local advocates.
>
> FW> But, clearly we still have had only modest success getting folks in
> FW> the developing world actively involved in the global OSGeo activities.
>
> FW> Best regards,
>
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> immediately.
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Landon Blake]

I'm interested in working with professional associations for land surveyors. I 
would want to start with my local state association, of course.

I'm not sure how much interest there is in this type of cross-organization 
collaboration.

Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
 
 

-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of Maxim Dubinin
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:50 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

Hi

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

Maxim

Вы писали 30 сентября 2009 г., 11:03:35:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FW> Best regards,

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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

"Fawcett, David"  wrote:
> Mateusz, 
> 
> Thanks for posting this reference, I wasn't aware of it.  It is a gold
> mine!
> 
> Obviously, thanks to Chris for putting this course together and making
> it available to the world too.
> 
> David.
> 

Wow, yes it's great isn't it?  Even some topology examples to work from!


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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Fawcett, David]

Mateusz, 

Thanks for posting this reference, I wasn't aware of it.  It is a gold
mine!

Obviously, thanks to Chris for putting this course together and making
it available to the world too.

David.

-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Mateusz Loskot
Sent: Sunday, October 04, 2009 11:21 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

Eric Wolf wrote:
> I surely don't need another project right now, but I've been trolling
to
> find a co-author to create a cookbook-style Python geoprocessing book
that
> uses GDAL/OGR and other FOSS libraries. This would be considered a
text for
> a fairly advanced GIS course.

Eric,

You may want to look at Chris Garrard's work:

"Geoprocessing with Python using Open Source GIS"

http://www.gis.usu.edu/~chrisg/python/2009/

The slides make a kind of cookbook-style book, I think.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Bob Basques]

Eric, 

Now you're talk'in.  Sure took this thread long enough to get here.  :c) 

The Stick method allows for exactly what Eric describes, ease of use.  The same 
sorts of things I'm running into for Emergency Preparedness materials, I'm 
currently putting together as a prototype.  I've been pondering on getting a 
one-click setup for the data acquisition side of things, where the data service 
keeps itself in sync with some master (or set of master) database(s) online if 
there is a network available, otherwise it runs by itself with whatever it has. 
 Like in a class room setting. 

I'm running everything off the "Stick" too, Apache, Database(s), Firefox (as in 
I get to pick which Browser is used, big deal in some development circles).  
Where does this potentially go? 

One could address just about any sort of business need with this approach and 
set up a preconfigured system for desktop clients and or web clients.  Even 
running an impromptu webservice in the field from a USB stick during an 
emergency. 

The tricky part about the ease of use, is getting the data into/out of the mix. 
 There is always some sort of knowledge level required about a dataset that is 
generally needed to get it into a distributed system, is this where OSGEO comes 
in?.  Cascading services, and setting up EASY (as in automatic) syncing systems 
is the trick here, not putting the use tools together, most of us know how to 
do that already.  It's the data and making it easy to get at and consequently 
publish by the average (data) user. 

A user should be able to say, here is my data (in whatever form) and the 
software figures out what to do with it, how it's supposed to be indexed (it at 
all) and how it's supposed to be shared, as a desktop application dataset 
and/or as a published web accessible data source, all automatically. 

I have more ideas upon request . . .  :c) 

bobb 




>>> Eric Wolf  wrote:

... 



Maybe we should focus on a GIS on a stick product rather than a LiveDVD? 



... 

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Chris Puttick]

- "Eric Wolf"  wrote:


> 
> Maybe we should focus on a GIS on a stick product rather than a
> LiveDVD?


Jo Cook wrote you a Windows one of those already :) - so you could even give to 
the students for ongoing use of the tools and data. And of course that is about 
as functional a toolset (in toto) as exists for GIS, open or closed source...

http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/2009/09/01/portable-gis-version-2-released/

Cheers

Chris

PS This email is of course marketing so those who don't want any shouldn't read 
it ;)


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Fwd: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Bruce Bannerman]

Peter,

You make a very good point as to the value of marketing.

Thinking back to the early '90s when I was a MicroStation / Intergraph / GDS
user, the factor that attracted me across to using ESRI software at the time
was their marketing approach.

Where Bentley and Intergraph were focusing on technology and the benefits of
the latest widget, ESRI Australia were quietly selling their software by
focusing on how it was being used to solve real world problems. The people
managing the organisation at the time encouraged organisations to show how
they were solving their day to day problems (oh, and by the way, we used
product 'x' to do this). In Australia, ESRI AU appear to have now reverted
to focusing on the technology.


Perhaps that is something to try, demonstrating how the application of the
technology has solved problems, rather than focusing on the OSGeo technology
explicitly?



In addition to the other good suggestions to come out so far, I'd like to
see a good consistent and integrated Architecture developed for OSGeo
applications.

It can be rather daunting for someone new to FOSS4G to understand how the
various pieces fit together and what application or library should be used
where.

It would be particularly helpful to Enterprise Architecture types to
understand and feel more comfortable with a 'quality' integrated OSGeo
applications stack.

I know that Paul Ramsey has put together a few documents and I have some
mind maps (tracing applications and high level features) that are getting a
bit dated. Perhaps we can get a few of us together in Sydney to discuss this
further.


Bruce Bannerman









> -Original Message-
> From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
> [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Peter Batty
> Sent: Saturday, 3 October 2009 12:32 AM
> To: OSGeo Discussions
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
>
> A good discussion and one which is important for OSGeo's
> future. I agree with Cédric's initial statement that "The
> OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input
> from management, end user, marketing etc..." and I think that
> the responses to this thread reflect that. Most developers in
> my experience are skeptical of the value of / need for
> marketing (in the open source and closed source world), and
> we've seen a lot of that in the responses. I used to think
> that way too, but over time have come to appreciate the value
> of marketing more. Unfortunately the software business has
> many examples where a company became dominant despite having
> software that was inferior to its competitors, Microsoft and
> ESRI being two of these.
>
> Ultimately I think that a primary measure of the success of
> OSGeo has to be in the number of people using its products,
> and it is surely in the interests of developers to get more
> users too - which should result in more funding for further
> development, etc. I think that improved "marketing" would
> actually have much more impact in terms of getting more
> people using OSGeo products than anything we can do on the
> development front - there is always a long list of things to
> do, of course, but in general the current functionality of
> most OpenGeo products is very competitive, the main thing
> holding back broader usage is just that most people in the
> broader geospatial industry don't know about them (and/or
> they have misconceptions about open source software, etc).
>
> And thinking of marketing as taking people to fancy events
> etc is wrong (in this context at least) - I would say that
> better terms for what OSGeo should be doing in this area
> might be outreach and education (in various senses).
>
> One thing we are weak on in general is documentation on user
> projects / success stories. For example, last week I talked
> at the AGI conference in the UK and afterwards got an email
> from an attendee which said:
>
> "During your talk you mentioned that you use PostGIS a lot
> and I was wondering if you could let me know about your
> experiences with it? At the moment we have our data on
> different servers and in different formats and I'm trying to
> get it all into one place.  We have recently got SQL Server
> 2005 so I don't think we will be going for the 2008 spatial
> version for a few years.  Therefore I have been looking into
> PostGIS which seems to be the perfect solution.however, I'm
> struggling to find people who have used it on a regular basis."
>
>
> We need to make it easy for people to connect with existing
> OSGeo product users, not a "struggle".
>
> When I chose to use PostGIS for my startup a couple of years
> ago, a critical factor in that decision for me was att

RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Rafal Wawer]

Hi Eric,
Maybe we should focus on a GIS on a stick product rather than a LiveDVD?

We (CASCADOSS project) have been using our own distro for the training. You 
will find it here: http://cascadoss.competterra.com/cascadoss.php?livedvd_en
I am not entirely sure, but I think Compet-Terra developed a verison working 
from the USB-Stick.
Some excercises based upon this LiveDVD: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Wawer_Rafal

Best regards:
Raf


Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731






-Eric

-=--=---===---=--=-=--=---==---=--=-=-
Eric B. WolfNew! 720-334-7734
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography



On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Ian Turton 
mailto:ijtur...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty 
mailto:pe...@ebatty.com>> wrote:

> I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
> universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at the
> moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
> audience.

Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
that is what the universities are teaching the students on.

The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
most of your time sorting out the software issues.

So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?

Ian
--
Ian Turton
These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Mateusz Loskot]

Eric Wolf wrote:
> I surely don't need another project right now, but I've been trolling to
> find a co-author to create a cookbook-style Python geoprocessing book that
> uses GDAL/OGR and other FOSS libraries. This would be considered a text for
> a fairly advanced GIS course.

Eric,

You may want to look at Chris Garrard's work:

"Geoprocessing with Python using Open Source GIS"

http://www.gis.usu.edu/~chrisg/python/2009/

The slides make a kind of cookbook-style book, I think.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Eric Wolf]

As Ian said, the Universities are stuck in a vicious circle. Believe it or
not, faculty do try to teach a GIScience that is independent of any
particular software package. But the perspective ends up being that ESRI
provides both the tools and teaching materials in a consistent manner. If
the faculty is focusing on software-independent ideas, then using the most
readily available software makes their (and their lab managers' jobs
easier).
What is sorely missing is a suite of teaching materials for FOSS4G. Most of
the books for FOSS4G are written for programmers. If you've ever gotten near
a GIS course homed in a Geography Department, you know that the students
taking the course are decidedly not programmers. (In fact, this is also how
ESRI entrenches their software - by enable a massive array of functionality
without relying on actual programming).

I surely don't need another project right now, but I've been trolling to
find a co-author to create a cookbook-style Python geoprocessing book that
uses GDAL/OGR and other FOSS libraries. This would be considered a text for
a fairly advanced GIS course.

As for teaching labs, I think we are developing a good experience-base with
the OpenGeo LiveDVD. I used that DVD for the workshop I lead at GIS in the
Rockies on GeoServer. It worked brilliantly for a simple workshop like that.
What's missing is the ability to save the state. University labs frequently
require multiple sessions to get through and build on one another - unlike
the OpenGeo GeoServer workshop that can be cranked out in 45 minutes and is
done.

Maybe we should focus on a GIS on a stick product rather than a LiveDVD?

-Eric

-=--=---===---=--=-=--=---==---=--=-=-
Eric B. WolfNew! 720-334-7734
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography



On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Ian Turton  wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:
>
> > I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
> > universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at
> the
> > moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
> > audience.
>
> Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
> software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
> because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
> that is what the universities are teaching the students on.
>
> The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
> free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
> with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
> software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
> ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
> Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
> to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
> most of your time sorting out the software issues.
>
> So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
> high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
> signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
> the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
> homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
> on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
> elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?
>
> Ian
> --
> Ian Turton
> These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Charlie Schweik]

Ian Turton wrote:

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Charlie Schweik
 wrote:
  

I'm also wondering if we could get some funding somewhere to hold an invited
workshop (that pays for people to attend) to really dig into this.

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/gpg/nsf04_23/2.jsp#IID7 - I'm game to aid in
the request but I don't have any time to lead until December.

Good idea... I've just emailed an NSF officer I know to investigate this 
idea.

Charlie
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Micha Silver]

Charlie Schweik wrote:

.


This connects back to my earlier education post that Frank Warmerdam 
responded to. He asked:


"I would have thought it would be more productive to take existing 
curriculum guidelines and get project support in rebuilding them around

foss projects/products. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?"

I agree with this point, and I think that is what some, like Tyler M  
has been suggesting. However, I find myself wondering from a 
technology-learning angle, are there more specialized knowledge needed 
in the FOSS Geo space?


What kinds of skills are needed to contribute to the further 
development of various FOSS Geo technologies (this gets at the 
"joining/recruitment" issue of new developers) or building a community 
of user-driven innovators?
And what kinds of skills are needed for users of FOSS Geo 
technologies?  E.g., Desktop or Web-based GIS? For example, if I want 
to show a student how to map using OpenLayers, what would that student 
need to know? Or what skills would a student need to have to implement 
a Map Server application?  Is the idea of a curriculum around "FOSS 
Geo technologies" -- such as a "certificate" -- a useful idea for us 
to pursue?

Charlie:

That's a fascinating idea.  Offering certification in FOSS GIS software 
(even at more than one level) would help to:

   promote the use of the FOSS GIS stack
   probably expand the user base
   directly address the problem that has been raised that it's hard to 
get started with FOSS.
   help fend off the claim that the job market requires "certified" 
professionals.


And this seems to be something that should be right up OSGeo's alley. As 
an umbrella organization for many (most?) FOSS GIS projects, the 
training know-how is right at hand. Both training material and exams 
could be online. 
If I'm not mistaken, Red Hat's RHCE is highly respected.  Organizing 
something along that line would be a valuable and worthwhile goal for OSGeo.

--
Micha


Or am I off target here? If I'm not, I'm open to ideas on how to 
mobilize a group to work on this curriculum effort... William Kinghorn 
who I met in South Africa has written ideas on "exam areas" that might 
be a start... if people want to join in this idea let me know and 
perhaps I should schedule a Skype conference call to discuss more... 
I'd also like to find someone to take the lead on organizing and 
running this curriculum effort.


Charlie


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Ian Turton]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Charlie Schweik
 wrote:
>
> I'm also wondering if we could get some funding somewhere to hold an invited
> workshop (that pays for people to attend) to really dig into this.
>

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/gpg/nsf04_23/2.jsp#IID7 - I'm game to aid in
the request but I don't have any time to lead until December.

Ian
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Arnie Shore]

As a possible interim step, visiting lecturers are often welcome if they
bring some credentials.  ~ AS

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Charlie Schweik
wrote:

> Ravi wrote:
>
>> 'Universities should teach only with FOSS'
>>
>> Wish academia think like that.
>>
> Part of the issue is getting faculty to learn themselves and make the
> shift. ...
>
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Charlie Schweik]

Ravi wrote:

'Universities should teach only with FOSS'

Wish academia think like that. 
Part of the issue is getting faculty to learn themselves and make the 
shift. This underlies what I am getting at. I need to learn it. Busy 
faculty teach what they have learned in the past. I'm currently involved 
in trying to get faculty at my campus to shift to R stats, for example. 
But it requires that they revise their material. Asst profs working 
toward tenure don't have the incentive to do this. So one of the key 
things is how can we help faculty retool?


This will be a long process. WHat might be easier is focusing on the 
next crop of Assistant Professors...


So one idea might be to start a wikipage (maybe with Digg-it like 
voting) listing  some key new FOSS geo research/development needs that 
grad students might take on as a thesis project


I'm puzzling if we should move this conversation over to the Edu 
listserv, but then it is great to have these people not subscribed there 
with ideas and input. I'd like to organize a BOF and possibly a virtual 
conference or workshop to really dig into this issue and come up with 
some concrete steps forward.


I'm also wondering if we could get some funding somewhere to hold an 
invited workshop (that pays for people to attend) to really dig into this.


Charlie

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Ravi]

'Universities should teach only with FOSS'

Wish academia think like that. I recall, how at a GSDI convention, a renouned 
professor of Geoinformatics was asked, 'Why dont you teach FOSS GIS', and pat 
came the reply. We teach as per the need and, as and when it arises we shall 
(teach FOSS GIS). That was in 2004 at Bangalore, India. 

By the day, even renowned Indian Institutes in collobaration with ITC 
Netherlands (of ILWIS fame) dont see much of ILWIS at use. They argue that, 
they teach what the students (who pay through their nose) are interested.

But, some universities have FOSS GIS on their Syllabus, and OSGeo India chapter 
is helping them teach.

Cheers
Ravi Kumar 
--- On Fri, 2/10/09, Agustin Diez Castillo  wrote:

> From: Agustin Diez Castillo 
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
> To: "Ian Turton" , "OSGeo Discussions" 
> 
> Date: Friday, 2 October, 2009, 11:02 PM
> I think is the other way around,
> Universities should teach only with FOSS. I like to think
> that at the universities we try to educate citizens no
> technicians, so 
> if we want that our graduates become free citizens we only
> have a way to do so, teach them with free tools. For years
> now, I've been wondering how and 
> when the Universities allow those Trojan horses (privative
> software) to populate our labs without any resistance and I
> can't find any reason, GRASS was 
> there before any other GIS packages and maths, logic,
> programming, geography and any other thing that is behind a
> particular software package used to 
> be taught at Universities for some time before those
> packages were marketed To me is like if instead of teaching
> Wittgenstein's philosophy we would teach 
> our students Nostradamus' prophecies because they are more
> appealing and is what our students or big corporations
> demand. I know university professors 
> that prefer what they know, but at Universities we're
> supposed to be in the avant-garde of knowledge if we want to
> teach the next leaders of the 
> community. 
> It makes no sense to use privative software when we have
> free alternatives that are as good them (ie GRASS vs
> Arcwhatever, R vs SPSS). 
> If we want critical thinking at the universities we should
> promote so avoiding the use of applications that will prone
> students to use illegal software instead 
> of using what it is free. My student's laptops are feed up
> with tons of illegal software, in fact I think that the only
> legal pieces are the ones that I suggest 
> them. Unfortunately for them, some don't know the
> difference between free and not free software because for
> them all is downloadable from some place.
> If students want to learn how to use a particular piece of
> software they can enroll in a myriad of seminars, big
> corporations have big training branches. An 
> you're right we should teach techniques and no software
> packages but more than that we should educate free citizens.
> 
> Truly, I can not understand why Universities teach closed
> knowledge when we should knowledge [openness is required to
> be knowledge]. We should teach 
> how to fish instead of give away fishes because this is
> what our students demand.
> To sum up, Universities should be the perfect place for
> Free Speech and in GIS packages Free Speech is FOSS4G.
> Anyhow, High Schools are a good place to start.
> > On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty 
> wrote:
> > 
> > > I think that programs to encourage greater use of
> OSGeo products in
> > > universities would be a great idea too - ESRI
> dominate in this area at the
> > > moment, but this would be another way to get the
> word out to a broader
> > > audience.
> > 
> > Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle
> with GIS
> > software in that the students demand we teach them on
> ESRI software
> > because that's what employers want and employers use
> ESRI software as
> > that is what the universities are teaching the
> students on.
> > 
> > The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for
> free (or nearly
> > free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more
> (undergraduate) students
> > with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to
> install the
> > software on all the lab machines in the university
> (which is where
> > ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way
> why can't I use
> > Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of
> course we're supposed
> > to be teaching techniques not software packages but
> you still spend
> > most of your time sorting out the software iss

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Charlie Schweik]

Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

I'm proposing the education group help match up existing FOSS teaching
material with a recognised curriculum.  e.g. the curriculum might say that a
student needs to learn about geographic coordinate systems - so we match up
a module that provides sample data and shows how to witness the effects of
transformations, projections, etc. using Proj.4 commands, then visualising
it in a desktop app, etc. that they may choose.  
  
I'm in agreement with this, vision Tyler -- we just have a collective 
action problem... how to get this done...  or move it forward, in a 
virtual environment.

p.s. In many universities I think we have been witnessing a move toward
'training' for careers as opposed to foundational concepts for critical
thinking.  
This may be true, but in my circumstance, I don't see where both can't 
happen at the same time. One of the best things about my job
is teaching a young undergrad about these concepts, and then providing 
them with the tools to do things like "go out and inventory and map the 
salamanders
in the river near your house and analyze the patterns you find" (or lots 
of other self-defined ideas) and get them excited and engaged. Having 
access to and knowledge about how
to use open tools that they can continue to use is a great way to get 
these kids excited and motivated! That's the perspective I'm coming from.


Charlie



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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

"Agustin Diez Castillo"  wrote:
> you're right we should teach techniques and no software packages but more
than
> that we should educate free citizens. 
> Truly, I can not understand why Universities teach closed knowledge when
we
> should knowledge [openness is required to be knowledge]. We should teach 
> how to fish instead of give away fishes because this is what our students
> demand.
> To sum up, Universities should be the perfect place for Free Speech and in
GIS
> packages Free Speech is FOSS4G.
> Anyhow, High Schools are a good place to start.

You beat me to it Agustin.  I agree with your points and was going to warn
that we not try to play at the same game as corporations that seek to embed
their products into schools.  Since, in the end it is what is taught that is
important, not what tool they learn.  Instead, I suggest we come at it from
the angle of providing additional tools to enable educators (at any level)
to teach the liberal arts/science aspects of a geographic education.  I
could be wrong, but it's my impression that in the past when this was done,
I believe universities were actually *producing* FOSS as an outgrowth of the
knowledge the students learned instead of merely ingesting some product. 
Any truth to that?

I'm proposing the education group help match up existing FOSS teaching
material with a recognised curriculum.  e.g. the curriculum might say that a
student needs to learn about geographic coordinate systems - so we match up
a module that provides sample data and shows how to witness the effects of
transformations, projections, etc. using Proj.4 commands, then visualising
it in a desktop app, etc. that they may choose.  

In the end maybe I do agree a bit with Ian, in that I don't think it's
profitable to be trying to usurp particular existing software roles in
academia - which many professors will have personally chosen.  How do you
fight a choice after all?   But we should come at it from a totally
different angle more along Agustin's philosophy and providing choices for
foundational teaching aligned with curriculum.  I'm personally not
interested in taking on an anti-proprietary angle in the debate and
encourage us to look at the problem afresh, with hope of possibilities :) 
Okay, that may be mostly just rhetoric, but we can't forget that even the
big proprietary guys are users and supports of some of OSGeo products and
libraries - a real success story for us.

Please note, for those who are unaware, we do have an Education discussion
mailing list where we talk about these things regularly too:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss

Best wishes,
Tyler

p.s. In many universities I think we have been witnessing a move toward
'training' for careers as opposed to foundational concepts for critical
thinking.  I suspect it has to do with competing with colleges and
independent training programs for student dollar$.  I don't think it's the
actual professors, but higher up that the mentality seems to set in. 
Consider also that all proprietary software has their own professional
training courses, material and training providers already - perhaps even at
lower cost and higher effectiveness than taking a full university course
over months and months.  Odd to think about in my mind :)  But it helps
remind me that there is also a market for education outside of established
academics as well... how much of a market remains to be seen.


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Agustin Diez Castillo]

I think is the other way around, Universities should teach only with FOSS. I 
like to think that at the universities we try to educate citizens no 
technicians, so 
if we want that our graduates become free citizens we only have a way to do so, 
teach them with free tools. For years now, I've been wondering how and 
when the Universities allow those Trojan horses (privative software) to 
populate our labs without any resistance and I can't find any reason, GRASS was 
there before any other GIS packages and maths, logic, programming, geography 
and any other thing that is behind a particular software package used to 
be taught at Universities for some time before those packages were marketed To 
me is like if instead of teaching Wittgenstein's philosophy we would teach 
our students Nostradamus' prophecies because they are more appealing and is 
what our students or big corporations demand. I know university professors 
that prefer what they know, but at Universities we're supposed to be in the 
avant-garde of knowledge if we want to teach the next leaders of the 
community. 
It makes no sense to use privative software when we have free alternatives that 
are as good them (ie GRASS vs Arcwhatever, R vs SPSS). 
If we want critical thinking at the universities we should promote so avoiding 
the use of applications that will prone students to use illegal software 
instead 
of using what it is free. My student's laptops are feed up with tons of illegal 
software, in fact I think that the only legal pieces are the ones that I 
suggest 
them. Unfortunately for them, some don't know the difference between free and 
not free software because for them all is downloadable from some place.
If students want to learn how to use a particular piece of software they can 
enroll in a myriad of seminars, big corporations have big training branches. An 
you're right we should teach techniques and no software packages but more than 
that we should educate free citizens. 
Truly, I can not understand why Universities teach closed knowledge when we 
should knowledge [openness is required to be knowledge]. We should teach 
how to fish instead of give away fishes because this is what our students 
demand.
To sum up, Universities should be the perfect place for Free Speech and in GIS 
packages Free Speech is FOSS4G.
Anyhow, High Schools are a good place to start.
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:
> 
> > I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
> > universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at the
> > moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
> > audience.
> 
> Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
> software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
> because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
> that is what the universities are teaching the students on.
> 
> The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
> free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
> with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
> software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
> ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
> Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
> to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
> most of your time sorting out the software issues.
> 
> So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
> high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
> signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
> the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
> homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
> on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
> elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?
> 
> Ian
> -- 
> Ian Turton
> These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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> 
> 


--
**
Dr. Agustín Diez Castillo
Departament de Prehistòria i Arqueologia
Phone:   +34 963 86 42 42
Avda. Blasco Ibañez, 28   Fax:  +34 963 86 42 34
València 46010
**




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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Helena Mitasova]

Ian,

there were many responses already but let me add mine:

 I have been fortunate to have a different experience
(maybe due the the fact that NCSU has a strong open source community
thanks to RedHat headquarters here on campus - and they are doing  
very well).


There were two core things that made the difference:

- I teach the Geospatial modeling and analysis class with both ArcGIS  
and GRASS

which turned out to be very useful because the students can quickly
learn what is software implementation issue and what is core/principles.
Many students take the class to learn GRASS and open source in general,
but at the same time they get the "industry standard".

- availability of easy to install winGRASS - I used to dismiss the  
huge effort that
it takes to get GRASS working on MSWindows (why bother?), but that  
allows
our sysadmins to install it easily everywhere and students can  
install it easily
on their laptops as well where they also run ArcGIS which they need  
for other classes.
And I also have students running GRASS on Macs - here the binary  
helps a lot too,

and they see the merits of portability when compared to ArcGIS.

So where we are now?

- the course has been just approved as a permanent course (quite a  
procedure

as you know)
- it is a mandatory course for the graduate GIST certificate and  
Professional MS in GIST -
so anybody with certificate or MS in GIST from NCSU gets some  
exposure to

open source software (I try to go beyond GRASS)
- we just started to offer it through Distance education, so even  
people who are not

enrolled at NCSU as full time students can take it
- and the most important - open source software is being added to  
other GIST

courses that used to be exclusively Arc oriented

So - there is a hope!
No question that it has been a challenge to teach GRASS to people
who have 10 year experience working with ArcGIS, so I take my students
as heroes for their persistence and staying in class and learning the  
new stuff
(we use nviz a lot to make it more fun), but I see great  
opportunities at universities

when open source is offered along with the industry standard products
and merged seamlessly into existing curricula.

So this is very much in line with what Martin has written and I can  
confirm
that there is a lot of interest in diversity of approaches, tools and  
ideas -

apparently even as we are an ocean apart we are on the same wavelength,

Helena

On Oct 2, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Ian Turton wrote:


On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:


I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this  
area at the
moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a  
broader

audience.


Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
that is what the universities are teaching the students on.

The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
most of your time sorting out the software issues.

So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?

Ian
--
Ian Turton
These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Rafal Wawer]

Hi Ian,
My colleague teaches both: ESRI and FOSS software at our University (KULeuven). 
We first exercised it during the Summer School with lot of sweat and stress (-; 
http://www.sadl.kuleuven.be/sadl/opleidingenDetail.aspx#FOSS
Then he included it in his regular teaching in GIS. From our experience with 
the professionals from the developing countries attending our summer schools, 
who are meant to teach our material further, we know that after 3 schools 
17-50% of the people used the materials (documents) in teaching GIS, 17% used 
it in their operational work, 13% for research. Software is indicated to be 
used by 13-17% for operational work, teaching 13% (only) and 25% for research. 
On the other hand... 38-75% of the people did not use the software at all after 
the course. For further details you can refer to our paper addressing the 
effectiveness of training materials in teaching FOSS4G: Van Orshoven, J., Wawer 
R. and Duytschaever K., 2009. Effectiveness of a train-the-trainer initiative 
dealing with free and open source software for geomatics. CD-ROM-proceedings of 
the AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2009, held 
in Hannover, Germany, 2-5-june-2009. 

You mentioned the general students' attitude to learn ESRI, which may beO true 
for the students targeting to be employees. In case they want to establish 
their own companies FOSS presents a lucrative option, diminishing the costs of 
starting the business.

Nice weekend to everyone (-:

Best regards:
Raf

Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731





-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of Ian Turton
Sent: 02 October 2009 16:55
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:

> I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in 
> universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at 
> the moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a 
> broader audience.

Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS software in that 
the students demand we teach them on ESRI software because that's what 
employers want and employers use ESRI software as that is what the universities 
are teaching the students on.

The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students with FOSS 
but first I have to find technician time to install the software on all the lab 
machines in the university (which is where ArcMap is provided) for just one 
course (and any way why can't I use Arc like everyone else will be the 
question). Of course we're supposed to be teaching techniques not software 
packages but you still spend most of your time sorting out the software issues.

So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on high 
schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has signed deals 
with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to the school. When I query 
teachers as to how the kids will do their homework they usually shrug and point 
out it's too hard for them to do on their own or that they can use the school 
library. May be elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?

Ian
--
Ian Turton
These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Martin Landa]

Hi,

2009/10/2 Ian Turton :
> Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
> software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
> because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
> that is what the universities are teaching the students on.
>
> The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
> free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
> with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
> software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
> ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
> Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
> to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
> most of your time sorting out the software issues.
>
> So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
> high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
> signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
> the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
> homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
> on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
> elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?

I think that a diversity, different approaches, tools, ideas, etc. are
the most important thing for the students at the universities.
Speaking about GIS tools/software we are trying at the CTU in Prague
(study program Geoinformatics) to use different tools in the GIS
courses. Besides ESRI (or generally proprietary) products we use also
FOSS. Concretely PostgreSQL in 'Database course', PostGIS in the
course 'Introduction to spatial data processing', GRASS GIS in the
course 'Remote sensing', etc. Students can also follow specialized
course 'Free Software GIS' [1]. The more approaches the better for the
students, especially at the universities. University is not a training
place;-)

Martin

[1] (in Czech) http://gama.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/index.php/153YFSG_Free_software_GIS
(in English) http://gama.fsv.cvut.cz/wiki/index.php/153YFSG_Free_software_GIS/en

-- 
Martin Landa  * http://gama.fsv.cvut.cz/~landa
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Charlie Schweik]

Ian Turton wrote:

Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
that is what the universities are teaching the students on.

So *I* think that universities are a lost cause 
I've had a slightly different experience. I've been teaching an early 
undergrad "Intro to Spatial Technologies" course to natural resource 
conservation students and have successfully used QGIS in this teaching. 
Some bugs we hit bothered some students, but many liked the idea that 
they had a GIS system on their laptops and that they could do some real 
integration of aerial photos, GIS layers, and simple database 
construction on their own machines. They could do the homeworks whenever 
they wanted, rather than go to designated computer labs. They could use 
it on their own projects after the class was over.  At the same time, 
they knew that  the job market looked for experience with other 
platforms.  So currently I teach a higher-level Applied GIS course using 
ESRI products as I always have. But I think this is one way to get 
college students exposed and potentially using open GIS technologies.


This connects back to my earlier education post that Frank Warmerdam 
responded to. He asked:


"I would have thought it would be more productive to take existing 
curriculum guidelines and get project support in rebuilding them around

foss projects/products. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?"

I agree with this point, and I think that is what some, like Tyler M  
has been suggesting. However, I find myself wondering from a 
technology-learning angle, are there more specialized knowledge needed 
in the FOSS Geo space?


What kinds of skills are needed to contribute to the further development 
of various FOSS Geo technologies (this gets at the "joining/recruitment" 
issue of new developers) or building a community of user-driven 
innovators? 

And what kinds of skills are needed for users of FOSS Geo technologies?  
E.g., Desktop or Web-based GIS? For example, if I want to show a student 
how to map using OpenLayers, what would that student need to know? Or 
what skills would a student need to have to implement a Map Server 
application?  Is the idea of a curriculum around "FOSS Geo technologies" 
-- such as a "certificate" -- a useful idea for us to pursue?


Or am I off target here? If I'm not, I'm open to ideas on how to 
mobilize a group to work on this curriculum effort... William Kinghorn 
who I met in South Africa has written ideas on "exam areas" that might 
be a start... if people want to join in this idea let me know and 
perhaps I should schedule a Skype conference call to discuss more... I'd 
also like to find someone to take the lead on organizing and running 
this curriculum effort.


Charlie

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[P Kishor]

I empathize with your sentiment, Ian, but disagree with your
arguments. More below.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Ian Turton  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:
>
>> I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
>> universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at the
>> moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
>> audience.
>
> Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
> software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
> because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
> that is what the universities are teaching the students on.
>

The above is too much of a generalization. I have not come across any
students ever demanding that they be taught with ESRI software.
Students get taught with whatever software the professor/instructor
wants to teach with.


> The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
> free) doesn't help.

That is a slippery slope argument. ESRI is, first, not giving the
software away for free. In my university, a fairly good-size
university, I might add, a site-wide ESRI license is $25K or something
like that (I don't know the exact number, but I am in the ballpark).
Different depts. chip in toward that site license, and then they get a
slew of licenses to use. Students can use the software in the labs
without paying anything for it, of course, or they can buy personal,
yearly or perpetual (as long as they are students) licenses. Yes, $25K
is nearly free in the context of ESRI or a large university,
neverthless, it *is* substantially more than really free software.

One issue is, and it pains me to say this, but ESRI software *is*
easier to install and get started with. I am not talking about just
installing and starting with uDig or QGIS, but the full-fledged ESRI
suite.

The other issue is, as noted above, students learn from whatever the
instructors choose to use. And, instructors choose to use what is
either available to them or what has captured their mindshare.
Instructors are not developers -- they are scientists and scholars.
They want to teach soil analysis or journalism or wild bear tagging.
They just want to use GIS as the tool, and the tool available to them
is the one installed in their labs. Sometimes they demand that a
certain tool be installed in their lab, sometimes, they use the tool
that is installed in their labs.



> I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
> with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
> software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
> ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
> Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
> to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
> most of your time sorting out the software issues.
>

Exactly. You have to ask the technician to install the software you
want. Once the instructors start asking for a certain software, it
will start getting installed. Once a certain software is installed,
subsequent instructors will have that as a choice.

Just yesterday I got an email from a student announcing his Master's
exit seminar thusly --

"I'll be giving an overview of my work on the winter foraging
strategies of Adelie Penguins in the Western Antarctic Peninsula
(chapter 1 of my thesis), I will focus the majority of my talk on my
work to construct a tool in ArcGIS that allows for the identification
of locations of intense foraging based upon movement paths of GPS or
satellite tagged animals.  For those of you who are addressing the
analysis of spatial data or animal movements while using ArcGIS, I
think this talk may be of specific interest to you."


Nice. You and I may care about ArcGIS v. GRASS. The student above
cares about Adelie Penguins.


> So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
> high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
> signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
> the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
> homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
> on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
> elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?
>

I don't think universities are a lost cause. In fact, universities are
very much a winnable and winning cause. Once a substantial momentum is
reached, there will be a large enough population of users and
developers using, creating and contributing to open source as well as
proprietary software.


> Ian
> --
> Ian Turton
> These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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>



-- 
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Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Mem

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Paul Ramsey]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Ian Turton  wrote:

> So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
> high schools

Forget the great unwashed, think about providing useful materials
online to people who actually *want* to learn about the tools.
http://workshops.opengeo.org/ is the starting point we're using
corporately, at least salvaging the teaching effort we're expending at
conferences. Hats off to all teachers though -- preparing course
materials is a labor intensive grind, and like code the materials
require constant maintenance when you're teaching something as dynamic
as IT.

P
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Ian Turton]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Peter Batty  wrote:

> I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
> universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at the
> moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
> audience.

Currently universities are locked in a vicious circle with GIS
software in that the students demand we teach them on ESRI software
because that's what employers want and employers use ESRI software as
that is what the universities are teaching the students on.

The fact that ESRI are giving the software away for free (or nearly
free) doesn't help. I'd love to teach more (undergraduate) students
with FOSS but first I have to find technician time to install the
software on all the lab machines in the university (which is where
ArcMap is provided) for just one course (and any way why can't I use
Arc like everyone else will be the question). Of course we're supposed
to be teaching techniques not software packages but you still spend
most of your time sorting out the software issues.

So *I* think that universities are a lost cause and we should focus on
high schools - but in many states ESRI has got there before us and has
signed deals with the state to provide arc in schools at no cost to
the school. When I query teachers as to how the kids will do their
homework they usually shrug and point out it's too hard for them to do
on their own or that they can use the school library. May be
elementary schools are the winnable battlefield?

Ian
-- 
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These are definitely my views and not Penn States!
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Peter Batty]

A good discussion and one which is important for OSGeo's future. I agree
with Cédric's initial statement that "The OSGEO is very developer centric
and probably need more input from management, end user, marketing etc..."
and I think that the responses to this thread reflect that. Most developers
in my experience are skeptical of the value of / need for marketing (in the
open source and closed source world), and we've seen a lot of that in the
responses. I used to think that way too, but over time have come to
appreciate the value of marketing more. Unfortunately the software business
has many examples where a company became dominant despite having software
that was inferior to its competitors, Microsoft and ESRI being two of these.
Ultimately I think that a primary measure of the success of OSGeo has to be
in the number of people using its products, and it is surely in the
interests of developers to get more users too - which should result in more
funding for further development, etc. I think that improved "marketing"
would actually have much more impact in terms of getting more people using
OSGeo products than anything we can do on the development front - there is
always a long list of things to do, of course, but in general the current
functionality of most OpenGeo products is very competitive, the main thing
holding back broader usage is just that most people in the broader
geospatial industry don't know about them (and/or they have misconceptions
about open source software, etc).

And thinking of marketing as taking people to fancy events etc is wrong (in
this context at least) - I would say that better terms for what OSGeo should
be doing in this area might be outreach and education (in various senses).

One thing we are weak on in general is documentation on user projects /
success stories. For example, last week I talked at the AGI conference in
the UK and afterwards got an email from an attendee which said:

"During your talk you mentioned that you use PostGIS a lot and I was
wondering if you could let me know about your experiences with it? At the
moment we have our data on different servers and in different formats and
I’m trying to get it all into one place.  We have recently got SQL Server
2005 so I don’t think we will be going for the 2008 spatial version for a
few years.  Therefore I have been looking into PostGIS which seems to be the
perfect solution…however, I’m struggling to find people who have used it on
a regular basis."

We need to make it easy for people to connect with existing OSGeo product
users, not a "struggle".

When I chose to use PostGIS for my startup a couple of years ago, a critical
factor in that decision for me was attending FOSS4G and talking to others
who had used it. I think that the direction that FOSS4G goes in is another
key decision in terms of OSGeo's marketing strategy. I know there are people
in the community who want to keep the event small and intimate and focused
on the existing development community. There are others who think it is a
great opportunity to expose more new people to OSGeo products (me included),
and that we should do more to grow the conference (and I think there are
ways we can do this and meet the concerns of the development community, as
we talked about in the Denver 2010 proposal).

I think that programs to encourage greater use of OSGeo products in
universities would be a great idea too - ESRI dominate in this area at the
moment, but this would be another way to get the word out to a broader
audience.

I think that all these things I have mentioned are better done at the OSGeo
level than the project level.

So anyway, I don't believe that marketing is evil, I think it's really
important if you want reasonable numbers of people to use the cool software
that you're developing, and I think it's important that OSGeo continues to
work on this area. And that the type of marketing we are talking about is
really outreach and education, which hopefully are more acceptable terms to
most :).

I will sign up to the marketing committee as Tyler suggested, and encourage
others who are interested to do so too.

Cheers,
Peter.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) <
tmitch...@osgeo.org> wrote:

>
> "Jacolin Yves"  wrote:
> > Hello Cédric,
> >
> > I think more people think same as you relating this point of view :) :
> >
> > Le Wednesday 30 September 2009 16:28:20 Cédric Moullet, vous avez écrit :
> >> The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
> >> management, end user, marketing etc...
>
>
> Thanks for the great discussion,
>
> I can relate to Yves and Cédric's comments.  Cédric's comment is the
> primary
> feedback I get from end users, local chapters and developers alike.  They
> ask for more information and material to share with others at events or
> meetings, etc.  They don't tend to point out technical barriers to their
> projects success, they already know and love a project and just want to
> t

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

On Wed, September 30, 2009 18:49, Maxim Dubinin wrote:
> Hi
>
>
> Local OSGeo chapters are great, but how about existing non-OSGeo groups?
> Does OSGeo have a strategy to
> build communication with them?
>
> Maxim

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

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

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

Best regards,
Arnulf.

> Âû ïèñàëè 30 ñåíòÿáðÿ 2009 ã., 11:03:35:
>
>
>>> where the cost of software licenses is far to high for the budgets
>>> thay have. Naturally, some of the users use cracks, but it won't be
>>> that easy enymore, especially in the domain of web services. OSGeo
>>> could support education in FOSS4G in those countries - with active
>>> marketing, sending information letters to the bodies responsible for
>>> mapping and environment.
>
> FW> I am a big believer in folks "pulling up their own socks" in this
> regard. FW> I am dubious about OSGeo trying to seed into countries without
> local FW> advocates, but there are things we can do to help support locals
> who FW> want promotional and training materials, and some introduction
> into FW> international circles.
>
>
> FW> Hopefully we can also provide an aura of deserved respectability
> FW> for our projects that will make it easier for decision makers to take
> FW> them seriously.
>
>
>>> OSGeo could also participate in dvelopment projects - like
>>> those small grants of GSDI, providing FOSS solutions, not mentioning
>>> European FP7 projects addressing Africa. For know the quite steep
>>> learning curve to get into FOSS4G is very often keeping the potential
>>> users away.
>
> FW> There are things we can do, but to a large extent the benefits will
> go FW> to those users who realize some investment in learning is
> worthwhile.
>
>>> Is OSGeo targeting those users now? If you look onto the map of
>>> registered members: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:OSGeo_Member,
>>> well, not everyone added himself to the map, but enyway, Africa, Asia
>>> and South America look quite empty (-;
>>>
>
> FW> There are things we are doing now, including holding FOSS4G in South
> FW> Africa last year, and making an effort to involve geographically
> diverse FW> folks in the charter membership and board.  We have also been
> supportive FW> (though perhaps we could be more so) of local chapters
> where they are FW> established by local advocates.
>
>
> FW> But, clearly we still have had only modest success getting folks in
> FW> the developing world actively involved in the global OSGeo activities.
>
>
> FW> Best regards,
>
>
> ___
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> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>

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

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

"Jacolin Yves"  wrote:
> Hello Cédric,
> 
> I think more people think same as you relating this point of view :) :
> 
> Le Wednesday 30 September 2009 16:28:20 Cédric Moullet, vous avez écrit :
>> The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
>> management, end user, marketing etc...


Thanks for the great discussion,

I can relate to Yves and Cédric's comments.  Cédric's comment is the primary
feedback I get from end users, local chapters and developers alike.  They
ask for more information and material to share with others at events or
meetings, etc.  They don't tend to point out technical barriers to their
projects success, they already know and love a project and just want to tell
others about it.  Of course we all have our software feature wishlists of
functionality but I don't think most of us expect OSGeo to be the venue for
developing them.  Like Frank says, don't tell the projects what to do ;-)

Not to say there aren't some powerful synergies to be gained at more
technical levels through OSGeo and some projects are certainly getting used
to depending on OSGeo services, but aside from requests to our systems admin
group, I rarely hear end users, advocates or even developers say OSGeo needs
to do anything further at a technical level (except maybe more benchmarking,
live demo disks or binary package development).

I'm sure there will be some more good discussion over the upcoming months as
to focus and effort.  I see the education side as an obvious common goal,
and marketing as well, but I'm curious to hear more about some of the more
'developer centric' ideas people have in mind. I'm keen to hear further
ideas along Cédric's line of thinking too.

By the way, the Marketing Committee has a mailing list, all are welcome to
join to share ideas and volunteer.  It's been pretty quiet lately, so don't
be shy and come and share your thoughts:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing

Best wishes,
Tyler



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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 09:36:35AM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> That kind of high-touch approach will have to be left to those (like,
> hopefully OpenGeo) who are building and monetizing products around the
> core software. The non-profit core organization can't do that unless
> it's willing to become much more vendor-like, which is something OSGeo
> has repeatedly shied away from (perhaps because OSGeo has many members
> who work for companies, that, like OpenGeo, are monetizing open
> source).

(And Paul says in a paragraph what I say poorly in 10.)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:24:37PM +, Chris Puttick wrote:
> 
> - "Christopher Schmidt"  wrote:
> > > 
> > > Speak to whom? Decision makers with no real knowledge of the thing
> > they are
> > > signing off on, being advised by lazy people who have some
> > understanding but
> > > want to ensure they cover their back and don't have to try too
> > > hard
> > rather
> > > than implement the best solution for the least money?
> > 
> > No, to the lazy people. If your code is good enough, then the right
> > way -- even the lazy way -- will be the Open Source way. In order to
> > really succeed,
> 
> You've not been hanging with enough lazy people. Laziness is taking the path
> of least resistance; in IT that means using the brand most people know about
> regardless if it is the best tool for the job. 

Sometimes brand is all that matters. In that case, I don't think that a
successful marketer changes the equation.

Sometimes more than the brand matters; especially when the person who is
going to be implementing any potential solution has a say in the way the
solution is developed. I maintain that *Those* cases are the ones to
target first: When OSGeo software projects are succeeding at those
regularly (not a done deal yet, in my mind) then we (as a community) can
turn to outreach as a next step.

> You think people went to NT Server because it was better than Netware?
> It wasn't. People chose MS SQL Server because it was better than its
> competitors, open or closed source? It wasn't (and in so many ways
> still isn't). 

And the reasons for those are not ones that would be swayed by any
marketing argument that an OSGeo representative could make. If the fact
that our software is better, cheaper, and more fully featured, and
people still want to use ESRI -- as is often the case -- then why fight
them? What is the point in spending your effort to force your way into a
community that is fighting against you, rather than -- for example --
expanding into a developing market that doesn't have the same
preconceptions? The latter will have way more chance of improving the
projects through more contributions, etc. in the end, in my opinion.

> Marketing. Branding. Lots of ferrying decision makers to
> shiny demo labs and glossy events and making them feel good about the
> product, regardless of the fact that driving sports cars around race
> tracks has nothing to do with the promo'd products effectiveness
> (although such events should provide some pointers about value for
> money...).

Again, if people are making decisions based on irrational things, then
OSGeo software isn't going to convince them. I do not think that OSGeo
should attempt to compete with the 'big boys' in terms of dollars and
effort spent on advertising. That would be a mistake, because those
dollars could almost universally be better spent -- by the organization
-- in supporting a developer attending a conference or sprint, in
getting better project hosting together, or other things like that.

Sure, if money, time, and energy were infinite, marketing in the same
way that the Big.Co.s do would make sense, but they're not. With that in
mind, I think that OSGeo should not be about trying to push out other
software: We should document what projects are, what they do, how they
do it *better* -- and if people don't want better, that's all there is
to it.

(Note that this does not apply to companies using OSGeo software, or
doing contracting, or anything else like that. They are well-suited for
that type of 'convincing', whereas OSGeo is positioned poorly for it.)

> Laziness is going with the solution most people have heard of; in
> particular not having to look at lots of options and not having to
> come up with a real defence in the event of issues arising from the
> choices made. No one ever got fired for buying IBM was a line in the
> 80s regarding computing solution purchases; in GIS right now I guess
> you all know the products in the typical organisational list - how
> many open source ones are on it? 

Actually, to be honest, I don't. I do know that the products in my
organization's list are MapServer, GDAL, and OpenLayers, and have been
since before my time. 

I'm sure that there are many companies out there that are like this.
Changing companies that aren't -- rather than documenting what exists
and allowing them to make the choice -- is (at least at this point, and
in my opinion for the forseeable future) not worth the effort when it
could be easily spent better.

> For sure OSGeo and most open source products will never have big
> marketing budgets, so no sports cars, F1 practice days, Grand Prix
> tickets, WSB tickets (to name a few I've recently been offered as a
> decision-maker); but there are other kinds of marketing and that we
> can, should and do engage in. And the next time I meet a typical peer
> at an IT management conference and he has gvSIG on his desktop GIS
> shortlist and his SDI components are all open source or at le

RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Michael P. Gerlek]

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

You mean groups like local ESRI chapters, ASPRS chapters, GIS professionals, 
etc?

I'd encourage the local chapters to find such non-OSGeo local groups and offer 
to crash^H^H^H^H^Hattend one of their meetings and do a presentation on what 
OSGeo has to offer.

-mpg

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Maxim Dubinin]

Hi

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

Maxim

Вы писали 30 сентября 2009 г., 11:03:35:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FW> Best regards,

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Charlie Schweik]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:


I would instead express this as OSGeo needs end users (including their
managers), and those interested in it's marketting (which I would prefer
to call promotion) to get more actively involved and contribute.
Education activities are, of course, one form of promotion. There is 
some discussion in the Education group to try and develop a "core 
curriculum" around OS Geospatial technologies. For example, what 
knowledge/skills are needed for future OS Geo developers? What are 
needed for end users of OS Geo technologies? I don't think we should be 
competing with general GIS or GIScience curriculum, but rather focus 
specifically on OS Geo related knowledge and skills.


I can imagine the software developers are working flat-out. But is it 
possible that over the next 6-12 months there can be an effort between 
the OSGeo edu group, along with the software groups and the local groups 
together to try and establish some kind of specification of what we 
think a "core curriculum" or "core competencies" in OS Geo might be and 
then work toward developing open educational content that teaches these 
concepts?


If this resonates with others email me and I'll build an interest list.

-- Charlie Schweik


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Paul Ramsey]

That kind of high-touch approach will have to be left to those (like,
hopefully OpenGeo) who are building and monetizing products around the
core software. The non-profit core organization can't do that unless
it's willing to become much more vendor-like, which is something OSGeo
has repeatedly shied away from (perhaps because OSGeo has many members
who work for companies, that, like OpenGeo, are monetizing open
source).

As Alaric the Visigoth once said "Rome wasn't sacked in a day".

P.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Chris Puttick
 wrote:

> Marketing. Branding. Lots of ferrying decision makers to shiny demo labs and 
> glossy events and making them feel good about the product, regardless of the 
> fact that driving sports cars around race tracks has nothing to do with the 
> promo'd products effectiveness (although such events should provide some 
> pointers about value for money...).
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Chris Puttick]

- "Christopher Schmidt"  wrote:
> > 
> > Speak to whom? Decision makers with no real knowledge of the thing
> they are
> > signing off on, being advised by lazy people who have some
> understanding but
> > want to ensure they cover their back and don't have to try too hard
> rather
> > than implement the best solution for the least money?
> 
> No, to the lazy people. If your code is good enough, then the right
> way -- 
> even the lazy way -- will be the Open Source way. In order to really
> succeed,

You've not been hanging with enough lazy people. Laziness is taking the path of 
least resistance; in IT that means using the brand most people know about 
regardless if it is the best tool for the job. You think people went to NT 
Server because it was better than Netware? It wasn't. People chose MS SQL 
Server because it was better than its competitors, open or closed source? It 
wasn't (and in so many ways still isn't). Marketing. Branding. Lots of ferrying 
decision makers to shiny demo labs and glossy events and making them feel good 
about the product, regardless of the fact that driving sports cars around race 
tracks has nothing to do with the promo'd products effectiveness (although such 
events should provide some pointers about value for money...).

Laziness is going with the solution most people have heard of; in particular 
not having to look at lots of options and not having to come up with a real 
defence in the event of issues arising from the choices made. No one ever got 
fired for buying IBM was a line in the 80s regarding computing solution 
purchases; in GIS right now I guess you all know the products in the typical 
organisational list - how many open source ones are on it? Is it because the 
open source products can't do the job?

For sure OSGeo and most open source products will never have big marketing 
budgets, so no sports cars, F1 practice days, Grand Prix tickets, WSB tickets 
(to name a few I've recently been offered as a decision-maker); but there are 
other kinds of marketing and that we can, should and do engage in. And the next 
time I meet a typical peer at an IT management conference and he has gvSIG on 
his desktop GIS shortlist and his SDI components are all open source or at 
least open standards compliant, I'll know the marketing is paying off!

NB In my case laziness is probably avoiding learning to be a developer (and GIS 
person) while still wanting to be of use...


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Paul Ramsey]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Christopher Schmidt
 wrote:

> For this reason, efforts like "Marketing" are (in my opinion) less important
> than, for example, setting up a test server for running buildbot, or other
> things that help software become successful.

I agree with Chris, and I think it's important to stress what while
marketing activities are *less* important than support activities for
the development of the software, that does not mean that marketing
activities are *unimportant*. Just that, in the hierarchy of things
OSGeo should concern itself with, keeping the development lights on is
number one. Once that's taken care of, all power to marketing! Because
without software, the marketing doesn't have much purpose.

P
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Frank Warmerdam]

Rafal Wawer wrote:

Hi Frank, For your end-users I see a lot of opportunities in developing
countries, 


Rafal,

So do I, particularly because I think in those countries people will
see that some elbow grease and investment in their own knowledge can
give them what they need for a low cost, and providing future
opportunities.


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


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

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

> OSGeo could also participate in dvelopment projects - like

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


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


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


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

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

Best regards,
--
---+--
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 02:57:15PM +, Chris Puttick wrote:
> 
> - "P Kishor"  wrote:
> 
> > 2009/9/30 Cédric Moullet :
> > ..
> > > - The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input
> > from
> > > management, end user, marketing etc...
> > ..
> > 
> > noo!
> > 
> > Let our work, and not marketers and management, speak for us.
> > 
> 
> Speak to whom? Decision makers with no real knowledge of the thing they are
> signing off on, being advised by lazy people who have some understanding but
> want to ensure they cover their back and don't have to try too hard rather
> than implement the best solution for the least money?

No, to the lazy people. If your code is good enough, then the right way -- 
even the lazy way -- will be the Open Source way. In order to really succeed,
I think you need to make it so that organizations which aren't already 
entrenched see your software as the best tool for the job. Once you
do that, the 'lazy' people you're talking about here see it, and use it,
over the proprietary solutions.

Obviously, for organizations which are already entrenched, this is a more
difficult task, and I think that that's a case where OSGeo can support
more educational efforts, but the software really has to stand on its own
before marketing will be successful with the type of people your'e talking 
about, in my opinion.

> Trust me, the mean and nasty marketing and management types can be a force
> for the good, and one *every* open source project needs to thrive.

I agree that *communication* -- spun as 'marketing', or many other
things -- is neccesary for the sake of Open Source projects. However, to 
go back to my earlier statements: I think that OSGeo can be a supportive
force in that direction, but the effort really needs to come from participants
in the project who have their own reputation built into the project. 
The motivation just isn't there otherwise.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Rafal Wawer]

Hi Frank,
For your end-users I see a lot of opportunities in developing countries, where 
the cost of software licenses is far to high for the budgets thay have. 
Naturally, some of the users use cracks, but it won't be that easy enymore, 
especially in the domain of web services. 
OSGeo could support education in FOSS4G in those countries - with active 
marketing, sending information letters to the bodies responsible for mapping 
and environment. OSGeo could also participate in dvelopment projects - like 
those small grants of GSDI, providing FOSS solutions, not mentioning European 
FP7 projects addressing Africa.
For know the quite steep learning curve to get into FOSS4G is very often 
keeping the potential users away. 

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

Best regards:
Raf

Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731





-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: 30 September 2009 17:14
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

Jacolin Yves wrote:
> Hello Cédric,
> 
> I think more people think same as you relating this point of view :) :
> 
> Le Wednesday 30 September 2009 16:28:20 Cédric Moullet, vous avez écrit :
>> The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from 
>> management, end user, marketing etc...
> 

Folks,

I would instead express this as OSGeo needs end users (including their 
managers), and those interested in it's marketting (which I would prefer to 
call promotion) to get more actively involved and contribute.

What we developers don't necessarily want is a bunch of others telling us what 
to do.

Best regards,
-- 
---+
---+--
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jacolin Yves wrote:

Hello Cédric,

I think more people think same as you relating this point of view :) :

Le Wednesday 30 September 2009 16:28:20 Cédric Moullet, vous avez écrit :

The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
management, end user, marketing etc...




Folks,

I would instead express this as OSGeo needs end users (including their
managers), and those interested in it's marketting (which I would prefer
to call promotion) to get more actively involved and contribute.

What we developers don't necessarily want is a bunch of others telling us
what to do.

Best regards,
--
---+--
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent

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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Michael P. Gerlek]

I agree, we don't want to compete directly with anyone nor do we want to take 
an adversarial political stance.

However, I'd offer that while the level of awareness of open source GIS 
offerings has much improved over the past couple years, it still has a ways to 
go and OSGeo can be a force for good in that area.


-mpg


> -Original Message-
> From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-
> boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Mateusz Loskot
> Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 7:58 AM
> To: OSGeo Discussions
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
> 
> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:28:20PM +0200, Cédric Moullet wrote:
> >> I'm sorry (and unhappy) to say that the
> >> GIS leaders (ESRI, Autdoesk, Intergraph etc...) don't see OSGEO has
> an
> >> important contradictor: from my point of view, this is what needs to
> be
> >> changed in the next 5 years.
> >
> > If someone wants to compete with ESRI -- that's fine. We should
> > support them insofar as we can with community resources, shared
> userbases,
> > and feedback. But it is not the job of OSGeo to make these projects
> > successful -- only to help them succeed based on their own efforts.
> 
> Especially, when one or two  of the mentioned companies have supported
> OSGeo Foundation a lot.
> 
> A holy war is something that should be avoided at most. It should not
> be
> about how to compete and win the market, but about how to effectively
> collaborate in wide range of areas.
> 
> Best regards,
> --
> Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Chris Puttick]

- "P Kishor"  wrote:

> 2009/9/30 Cédric Moullet :
> ..
> > - The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input
> from
> > management, end user, marketing etc...
> ..
> 
> noo!
> 
> Let our work, and not marketers and management, speak for us.
> 

Speak to whom? Decision makers with no real knowledge of the thing they are 
signing off on, being advised by lazy people who have some understanding but 
want to ensure they cover their back and don't have to try too hard rather than 
implement the best solution for the least money?

Trust me, the mean and nasty marketing and management types can be a force for 
the good, and one *every* open source project needs to thrive.

I may of course be biased, being just such a type...

:)

Chris


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Mateusz Loskot]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:28:20PM +0200, Cédric Moullet wrote:

I'm sorry (and unhappy) to say that the
GIS leaders (ESRI, Autdoesk, Intergraph etc...) don't see OSGEO has an
important contradictor: from my point of view, this is what needs to be
changed in the next 5 years.


If someone wants to compete with ESRI -- that's fine. We should
support them insofar as we can with community resources, shared userbases,
and feedback. But it is not the job of OSGeo to make these projects
successful -- only to help them succeed based on their own efforts.


Especially, when one or two  of the mentioned companies have supported 
OSGeo Foundation a lot.


A holy war is something that should be avoided at most. It should not be 
about how to compete and win the market, but about how to effectively

collaborate in wide range of areas.

Best regards,
--
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[P Kishor]

2009/9/30 Cédric Moullet :
..
> - The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
> management, end user, marketing etc...
..

noo!

Let our work, and not marketers and management, speak for us.



-- 
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Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:28:20PM +0200, Cédric Moullet wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I read these interesting answers and I'd like to bring my point of view. I
> know, I'm quite new in the OSGEO world (1 year, previously by Autodesk and
> other "porprietary" structures), but I'm sorry (and unhappy) to say that the
> GIS leaders (ESRI, Autdoesk, Intergraph etc...) don't see OSGEO has an
> important contradictor: from my point of view, this is what needs to be
> changed in the next 5 years.
> 
> I see several reasons that explain the current situation:
> - The majority of OSGEO software are dependent of a few heroic developers or
> a few heroic companies that have nothing in comparison with the GIS leaders.
> With the same idea, the OSGEO is depending of a few persons that have
> another job and do that "as extra" (how many incubation requests pending ?)
> - There is almost no marketing (comparing to GIS leaders) done around the
> OSGEO Software
> - A large part of the GIS market is not addressed by OSGEO Software. I'm
> particularly thinking to the industry that need to invest billions of
> dollars (if you don't believe me, please ask Geoff ;-) and OSGEO has for now
> no stacks that is able to answer these need.
> - The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
> management, end user, marketing etc...

I think that all of these things center around a primarily different
desire for OSGeo than I personally have.

My goal is to: 
 * Support projects and allow them to succeed
 * Support developers and users and allow them to succeed

An organization like the Free Software Foundation, for example, wants to 
educate people that Free Software is the only Option that people should 
choose. I do not believe that this should be the role of OSGeo. Instead,
I think OSGeo should take a role of supporting developers in pursuing their
projects. If someone wants to compete with ESRI -- that's fine. We should
support them insofar as we can with community resources, shared userbases,
and feedback. But it is not the job of OSGeo to make these projects
successful -- only to help them succeed based on their own efforts.

For this reason, efforts like "Marketing" are (in my opinion) less important
than, for example, setting up a test server for running buildbot, or other
things that help software become successful. We have already seen ibg
companies like ESRI and Google using open source software within their
applications -- this type of commercially successful effort did not require
marketing on the behalf of OSGeo projects. They simply were the best
tool for the job.

The job of OSGeo should be to provide the resources for educated users to
make the correct decisions, if they seek them. Pushing the information 
to people who are currently happy with non-OSGeo solutions seems (to me)
to be far less important in the big scheme of things.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Jacolin Yves]

Hello Cédric,

I think more people think same as you relating this point of view :) :

Le Wednesday 30 September 2009 16:28:20 Cédric Moullet, vous avez écrit :
> The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
> management, end user, marketing etc...

Best regards,

Y.
-- 
Yves Jacolin

Ne demandez pas si vous pouvez contribuer, contribuez ! :)
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Cédric Moullet]

Hi,

I read these interesting answers and I'd like to bring my point of view. I
know, I'm quite new in the OSGEO world (1 year, previously by Autodesk and
other "porprietary" structures), but I'm sorry (and unhappy) to say that the
GIS leaders (ESRI, Autdoesk, Intergraph etc...) don't see OSGEO has an
important contradictor: from my point of view, this is what needs to be
changed in the next 5 years.

I see several reasons that explain the current situation:
- The majority of OSGEO software are dependent of a few heroic developers or
a few heroic companies that have nothing in comparison with the GIS leaders.
With the same idea, the OSGEO is depending of a few persons that have
another job and do that "as extra" (how many incubation requests pending ?)
- There is almost no marketing (comparing to GIS leaders) done around the
OSGEO Software
- A large part of the GIS market is not addressed by OSGEO Software. I'm
particularly thinking to the industry that need to invest billions of
dollars (if you don't believe me, please ask Geoff ;-) and OSGEO has for now
no stacks that is able to answer these need.
- The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
management, end user, marketing etc...

That's only my analysis of the situation. But I think that if the OSGEO
foundation wants to reach its gooal: "Created to support and build the
highest-quality open source geospatial software. Our goal is to encourage
the use and collaborative development of community-led projects.", it needs
to define a clear direction and make some consequent investments.

Sorry if theses comments are crude, only my 2 cents,

Cédric

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) wrote:
>
>> I want to add that for me it is also a goal to limit OSGeo's growth wrt
>> the number of paid staff and budget. We can make good use with 100k more
>> for hardware, services and to have more reserves for the conferences.
>> But I believe that we should not let the budget grow beyond ~half a
>> million - not even in five years. If there is money to make then it
>> should be made by businesses. They in turn are welcome to sponsor OSGeo.
>> By supporting FOSS business development OSGeo automagically supports
>> itself.
>>
>
> Arnulf,
>
> I also am not keen on a big budget organization, though I wouldn't
> want to put any specific limit on it.  Areas I *would* like to see
> grow budget wise is "project sponsorship" as a mechanism for user
> organizations to share in supporting project development.  Of course, that
> will depend to a large part on the success of projects in soliciting funds
> and putting them to effective use.
>
> One thing I am leery about, but that has been suggested by some, is OSGeo
> trying to provide professional services as a way of raising money.  I think
> this is best left to the FOSS business community.  I feel this way for
> two reasons.
>
>  (1) OSGeo does not really have the managerial strength to effectively
> deliver customer oriented projects.
>
>  (2) I don't want to compete against our partners in the business
> community who are already providing so much of the important "push"
> for free geospatial software development and deployment.
>
> I would like to see growing sponsorship funds to help support educational,
> promotional and community oriented efforts by OSGeo.  Quite a bit of this
> can be effectively done at the local level by local chapters.
>
>  Local Chapters should grow by themselves, in most cases an small initial
>> stub created from "within" OSGeo "Global" is enough to get going. And as
>> Howard said - the life of OSGeo is within the local chapters.
>>
>
> I think local chapters are important, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as you
> on this.  I think global project, and osgeo special interest group mailing
> lists can also be where a good deal of the "life" of OSGeo is.
>
> My "next 5 years" list might look something like:
>
>  - A broad set of quality software projects under the OSGeo banner
>   that feel they are getting good value from OSGeo in terms of
>   promotion, branding and systems support.  Furthermore that the
>   developer and user communities feel they have a fair (equal
>   opportunity) environment to contribute and effect their projects.
>
>  - Educational support resources sufficient to be deployed directly
>   for post-secondary educational organizations wanting to roll out
>   a GIS/geospatial program based on free software *and* a significant
>   number of organizations who have done so and are publically involved
>   in supporting further improvements to the materials.
>
>  - Lots of local chapters pursuing a diversity of local initiatives
>   with lots of inter chapter, chapter-project, and chapter-osgeo
>   linkages.  Hopefully local chapters will be hot-beds of innovative
>   activities even when "OSGeo" is somewhat slow moving.
>
>  - OSGeo facilitated delivery of vetted, integrated software stacks
>   "ready to

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) wrote:

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


Arnulf,

I also am not keen on a big budget organization, though I wouldn't
want to put any specific limit on it.  Areas I *would* like to see
grow budget wise is "project sponsorship" as a mechanism for user
organizations to share in supporting project development.  Of course, that
will depend to a large part on the success of projects in soliciting funds
and putting them to effective use.

One thing I am leery about, but that has been suggested by some, is OSGeo
trying to provide professional services as a way of raising money.  I think
this is best left to the FOSS business community.  I feel this way for
two reasons.

 (1) OSGeo does not really have the managerial strength to effectively
 deliver customer oriented projects.

 (2) I don't want to compete against our partners in the business
 community who are already providing so much of the important "push"
 for free geospatial software development and deployment.

I would like to see growing sponsorship funds to help support educational,
promotional and community oriented efforts by OSGeo.  Quite a bit of this
can be effectively done at the local level by local chapters.


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


I think local chapters are important, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as you
on this.  I think global project, and osgeo special interest group mailing
lists can also be where a good deal of the "life" of OSGeo is.

My "next 5 years" list might look something like:

 - A broad set of quality software projects under the OSGeo banner
   that feel they are getting good value from OSGeo in terms of
   promotion, branding and systems support.  Furthermore that the
   developer and user communities feel they have a fair (equal
   opportunity) environment to contribute and effect their projects.

 - Educational support resources sufficient to be deployed directly
   for post-secondary educational organizations wanting to roll out
   a GIS/geospatial program based on free software *and* a significant
   number of organizations who have done so and are publically involved
   in supporting further improvements to the materials.

 - Lots of local chapters pursuing a diversity of local initiatives
   with lots of inter chapter, chapter-project, and chapter-osgeo
   linkages.  Hopefully local chapters will be hot-beds of innovative
   activities even when "OSGeo" is somewhat slow moving.

 - OSGeo facilitated delivery of vetted, integrated software stacks
   "ready to use" for user organizations, and considered "enterprise
   ready".  Think of OSGeo4W, Debian GIS and the recent FOSS4G
   LiveDVD as examples of forms this might take.

 - A continued strong FOSS4G, acknowledged as the primary global
   meeting of the tribes, though it might not be significantly
   larger than it is now.

 - Financial income coming from a wide diversity of sponsors, most
   of which are end-user organizations.  Also some money coming
   in the form of grants in support of specific activities (such
   as work on educational products or standards participation).

 - The organization has sustained income sufficient to support an ED,
   project systems requirements, with enough money left over to
   pursue a variety of initiatives.  I think sufficient funding would
   be in the $25 to $40 area.

 - OSGeo pursuing a variety of modest cost, non-permanent initiatives.
   Things like holding special meetings with travel support for
   "desktop integration" or "standards development and implementation
   sprints".

Best regards,
--
---+--
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Ravi]

educational strategy:
+1 for this, and I think much of it is needed in the developing world.
OSGeo educating through local chapters to evangelise and bring all users of GIS 
to understand our phylosophy is a good thrust for the future too.
Ravi Kumar

--- On Mon, 28/9/09, Massimo Di Stefano  wrote:

> From: Massimo Di Stefano 
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
> To: "OSGeo Discussions" 
> Date: Monday, 28 September, 2009, 11:14 PM
> Hi All,
> 
> I agree with you i think we need a "local chapter" policy,
> to redistribute knowledge and organizational experience
> through the LC, helping ourselves to organize hack meetings
> and local conferences.
> 
> I think we also need to focus on an "educational strategy"
> to promote FOSS inside university departments.
> A lot of people uses proprietary sw for their works not
> because they think
> the proprietary software is better than the FOSS, but
> simply because they learned a proprietary application during
> their study and continue using them without considering
> other sw.
> 
> (cracking sw is too easy and in my experience  I see
> teachers even apply cracks or password cracked apps to their
> students)
> 
> So i hope to see in the next 5 years, OSGeo will improve in
> this direction, giving the right weight to an educational
> strategy.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Massimo.
> Il giorno 28/set/09, alle ore 18:17, Christopher Schmidt ha
> scritto:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:40:17PM -0500, Howard
> Butler wrote:
> >> 
> >> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell
> (OSGeo) wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about
> our vision for OSGeo over
> >>> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like
> to hear thoughts on the
> >>> matter
> >>> and pool a few of the ideas together for
> further discussions amongst
> >>> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
> >>> 
> >>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in
> the upcoming election
> >>> to
> >>> get a sense of where other members are
> thinking these days.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities
> I hope it shares in
> >> the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
> >> - Continued expansion of the local chapters. 
> Local chapters make OSGeo
> >> real in the sense that mailing lists, websites,
> and an IRC channel can't.
> >> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the
> next five years, and we
> >> start to use it our central fundraising piece.
> >> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal,
> osgeo4w, metacrs,
> >> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata
> continues to be
> >> fostered by us.  From my biased developer's
> perspective, these have been
> >> OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the
> local chapter development
> >> and consolidation of the conference.
> > 
> > I was going to write a post in response to this, but
> after reading
> > Howard's, I realize I hardly need to: essentially, his
> opinions and position
> > mirror mine 100%.
> > 
> > Best Regards,
> > --Christopher Schmidt
> > Web Developer
> > ___
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> ___
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Massimo Di Stefano]

Hi All,

I agree with you i think we need a "local chapter" policy, to  
redistribute knowledge and organizational experience through the LC,  
helping ourselves to organize hack meetings and local conferences.


I think we also need to focus on an "educational strategy" to promote  
FOSS inside university departments.
A lot of people uses proprietary sw for their works not because they  
think
the proprietary software is better than the FOSS, but simply because  
they learned a proprietary application during their study and continue  
using them without considering other sw.


(cracking sw is too easy and in my experience  I see teachers even  
apply cracks or password cracked apps to their students)


So i hope to see in the next 5 years, OSGeo will improve in this  
direction, giving the right weight to an educational strategy.


Regards,

Massimo.
Il giorno 28/set/09, alle ore 18:17, Christopher Schmidt ha scritto:


On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:40:17PM -0500, Howard Butler wrote:


On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo  
over

the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the
matter
and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.

It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election
to
get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.



My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares  
in

the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make  
OSGeo
real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel  
can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years,  
and we

start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have  
been
OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter  
development

and consolidation of the conference.


I was going to write a post in response to this, but after reading
Howard's, I realize I hardly need to: essentially, his opinions and  
position

mirror mine 100%.

Best Regards,
--
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:40:17PM -0500, Howard Butler wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
>> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the  
>> matter
>> and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
>> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>>
>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election  
>> to
>> get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
>
>
> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in  
> the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
> - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make OSGeo 
> real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't.
> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and we 
> start to use it our central fundraising piece.
> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,  
> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be  
> fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have been 
> OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter development 
> and consolidation of the conference.

I was going to write a post in response to this, but after reading
Howard's, I realize I hardly need to: essentially, his opinions and position
mirror mine 100%.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

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

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

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

Regards,
Arnulf.

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

Howard Butler schrieb:
> 
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> 
>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
>> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter
>> and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
>> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>>
>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to
>> get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
> 
> 
> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in
> the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
> - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make OSGeo
> real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't.
> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and we
> start to use it our central fundraising piece.
> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,
> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be
> fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have been
> OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter development
> and consolidation of the conference.
> 
> Howard
> ___
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> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss


-- 
Arnulf Christl
OSGeo President
http://www.osgeo.org
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Henning Lorenz]

In my opinion, a major challenge is to extend OSGeo beyond it's  
present topical range. Presently, OSGeo deals mainly with "classical"  
GIS, webmapping, and underlying technologies (generalised). I think  
this is also captured in this thread where references to and  
comparison with commercial GIS packages are common, and votes refer to  
GIS functionality (analytical functions, cartography). But geospatial  
is more than that. Investigating and describing the planet Earth in  
three (or four) dimensions is a necessity in Earth Sciences and  
related industry, in engineering (sciences) and societal planning  
(amongst others). This includes data acquisition, processing,  
interpretation and storage in three dimensions (from geological field  
work, drilling, geophysical experiments, in-situ and lab-experiments).  
Often commercial software packages are used for these purposes, but  
also opensource tools are available (OpenDTect, Seismic Unix,  
GMT, ...). The potential user base is broad and numerous, and the  
potential to attract developers high - many researchers, and maybe  
also companies, are used to develop their own tools.


I think it's a challenge in the two meanings of the word. It's  
necessary to do justice to the meaning of geospatial. And I think it  
is difficult to put in practice without a major project as a "catalyst".


Henning



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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Paolo Cavallini]

Dimitris Kotzinos ha scritto:
> Dear all,
> 
> I think that organizations like OSGeo have the difficult task to combine
> two - not always compatible - lines of action:

One thing I would like to see is more infrastructure for projects: I think this 
would make life
easier for several projects, and it would give a more solid impression. Eg a 
common infrastructure
for user maps (a surprising number of projects still do not have anu user map, 
and those who have it
do not share db or tools) would seem a good first candidate. Upgrading trac, 
adding useful plugins
to it, etc would be good.
Also putting other things in common would be good, eg sharing cartographic 
symbols and icons across
projects would make life easier for users and for developers.
I wouold also like to see closer contacts with and among local chapters.
All the best.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Dimitris Kotzinos]

Dear all,

I think that organizations like OSGeo have the difficult task to combine 
two - not always compatible - lines of action:

a/ expand our user base
b/ foster the open source software development projects
In that sense we are a bit different from organizations like Apache 
Foundation, where the user base is rather established or at least they 
are not the only source of user base expansion.


In that sense I would suggest that in the next 3 - 5 years we tackle 
both issues but look at them separately in the beginning but combine as 
much as possible. So, my suggestions:

a/ user base
1. expand the provided support for local chapters, probably try to find 
some seed money for those or sponsor some publicity
2. survey the users on what they feel is missing from the open source 
portfolio and try to form related developer communities, not necessarily 
top down but maybe with a strong influence - it is also important for 
non-developers to feel that they can influence things in a rather strong 
way (being a developer myself and re-reading what I just wrote, I might 
found that not particularly compelling :) but I think it would be 
acceptable after some time)
3. look to other organizations for Open Source, like Apache or Mozilla 
Foundations, to see how we can cooperate or just get some ideas
4. publicize a set of goals for the next 2 or 3 years and then report on 
 our success (or failure :))


b/ open source software development
1. take in more (all) existing projects that relate to GIS
2. attract more developers by reaching out to universities and companies 
(my experience is that at least in Greece is difficult to attract 
developers - not just developers that use OSS -  to FOSS4G)
3. get some companies to contribute code for products that we consider a 
useful addition, to the open source community

4. have a presentation to major open source developer conferences/events
5. more technical support for developers and some incentive for people 
to contribute back code they develop, also a process to ease that 
contribution
6. flexibility for people to start their own projects under OSGeo (even 
if they eventually fail)


Sorry for the lengthy e-mail but I think that the subject deserves some 
organized attention and thanks to Tyler that brought it up.


Best,

Dimitris
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Doug_Newcomb]

Perhaps this is related to Helena's  OSGeo Edu posting , but more efforts
towards outreach to the Elementary, Middle, and High School ( pre-college)
educational communities.  Working with them to set up pre-packaged lessons
involving geographic concepts in which you can give the student a CD/DVD
with project data and software that they could use at home  on their
Windows/Mac/Linux box.  Not just basic viewing, but some analysis as well.


Doug


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

The opinions I express are my own and are not representative of the
official policy of the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service or Dept. of the
Interior.   Life is too short for undocumented, proprietary data formats.


   
 Helena Mitasova   
 To
 Sent by:  OSGeo Discussions   
 discuss-boun...@l
 ists.osgeo.org cc
   
   Subject
 09/14/2009 11:47  Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years
 PMfor OSGeo   
   
   
 Please respond to 
 OSGeo Discussions 
   
   
   





On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Howard Butler wrote:

>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo
>> over
>> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the
>> matter
>> and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
>> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>>
>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming
>> election to
>> get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
>
>
> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares
> in the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
> - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make
> OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC
> channel can't.
> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years,
> and we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,
> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be
> fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have
> been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter
> development and consolidation of the conference.

+1 on these, including OSGeo Edu efforts as another example of  cross-
project collaboration

Helena
>
> Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[G. Allegri]

I agree that neither OsGEO nor the communities are meant to reproduce such
full featured proprietary architectures. I think thay should point to give a
strong, common, backgorund to even enable (someone) to build richer,
integrated platforms. I know it's a hard target, and something is going on
with this (ie the cartographic library), but it would help a lot to
guarantee a low level concistency between the softwares. Ok, I'm talking for
the C/C++ side of the world, but it's the same for the Java one. A good
exemple for the latter is the integration of SextanteGIS inside the major
projects (uDig, OpenJUMP, JGrass, Gvsig, etc.).

giovanni


2009/9/15 Michael P. Gerlek 

> Thinking aloud, a possible contrarian view:
>
> A goal like "to produce a comprehensive suite of tools [that do X or Y]..."
> doesn't likely fit with OSGeo's broad membership and interests.  We are an
> umbrella organization representing a number of projects, each with its own
> unique goals and agendas.  It is unlikely OSGeo would be able to produce a
> specific tool just because (hypothetically) the Board says we should: open
> source folks often don't take top-down direction well, unless it meets their
> own personal needs and agendas.
>
> Which is not to say that an analytical tool suite is a bad idea, just that
> it seems unlikely to be a worthy goal at that level of the hierarchy.
>
> -mpg
>
>
> > -Original Message-
> > From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-
> > boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of "René A. Enguehard"
> > Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 2:35 PM
> > To: OSGeo Discussions
> > Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
> >
> > What I'd like to see within the next 5 years would be more analytical
> > tools. Most of the projects in OSGeo are very much enablers: they put
> > the facilities in place for people to program their own tools. However,
> > as I have noticed over the years, people are reluctant to move to open
> > source implementations of geospatial software because they are, in
> > effect, losing capabilities. Yes, there is still the potential for the
> > same capabilities to be put back in, but the fact remains they just
> > aren't there. For example, I have never seen any MCDA, PCA, HotSpot
> > Analysis, CART or neural network tools in open source packages. If we
> > were to produce a comprehensive suite of tools offering the standard
> > analytical tools as well as some more advanced ones, then these
> > proprietary offerings wouldn't look as appealing. Moreover, if we had a
> > consolidated toolset which could be used on a multitude of project we
> > would not have to re-invent the wheel for each separate project.
> > Currently, proprietary software generally offers advanced analytic
> > capability out-of-the-box and open source software does not. I see this
> > as a bit of a stumbling block.
> >
> > Another thing, and I was chatting about this in the lab today, is that
> > for particular needs, open source implementations of geospatial
> > software
> > generally don't have much to offer. The generic capabilities are there,
> > or at least enabled for others to program, but special-needs cases
> > there
> > is not much. The example used today in the lab was CARIS HIPS or SIPS.
> > What, if anything, exists in the open source community that could come
> > close to the processing capabilities of this?
> >
> > Still another area with a lack of development is 3D and 4D modeling /
> > rendering / analysis, something like ESRI ArcGlobe with the 3D Analyst
> > package or Myriax Eonfusion. There has been very little work in these
> > domains which are of particular interest to me. Perhaps the amount of
> > people working in these areas is much smaller than the amount of people
> > using something more like general analytic capabilities, but it is an
> > area that "needs work" nonetheless.
> >
> > The point, and I'd like to make this clear, is not the I'm bemoaning
> > the
> > lack of features and projects in the open source community. I think
> > OSGeo and the open source community have done a tremendous job and
> > should feel, rightfully, proud at what they have accomplished. However,
> > when asked what I'd like to see on the agenda for OSGeo, this is it.
> > I'd
> > like to see a hard push towards analytics to make the various projects
> > we have to offer more directly useful to the average GIS user. In the
> > end, it's really about market penetration. The more useful open source
> > software is, the bet

RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Thinking aloud, a possible contrarian view:

A goal like "to produce a comprehensive suite of tools [that do X or Y]..." 
doesn't likely fit with OSGeo's broad membership and interests.  We are an 
umbrella organization representing a number of projects, each with its own 
unique goals and agendas.  It is unlikely OSGeo would be able to produce a 
specific tool just because (hypothetically) the Board says we should: open 
source folks often don't take top-down direction well, unless it meets their 
own personal needs and agendas.

Which is not to say that an analytical tool suite is a bad idea, just that it 
seems unlikely to be a worthy goal at that level of the hierarchy.

-mpg


> -Original Message-
> From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-
> boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of "René A. Enguehard"
> Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 2:35 PM
> To: OSGeo Discussions
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
> 
> What I'd like to see within the next 5 years would be more analytical
> tools. Most of the projects in OSGeo are very much enablers: they put
> the facilities in place for people to program their own tools. However,
> as I have noticed over the years, people are reluctant to move to open
> source implementations of geospatial software because they are, in
> effect, losing capabilities. Yes, there is still the potential for the
> same capabilities to be put back in, but the fact remains they just
> aren't there. For example, I have never seen any MCDA, PCA, HotSpot
> Analysis, CART or neural network tools in open source packages. If we
> were to produce a comprehensive suite of tools offering the standard
> analytical tools as well as some more advanced ones, then these
> proprietary offerings wouldn't look as appealing. Moreover, if we had a
> consolidated toolset which could be used on a multitude of project we
> would not have to re-invent the wheel for each separate project.
> Currently, proprietary software generally offers advanced analytic
> capability out-of-the-box and open source software does not. I see this
> as a bit of a stumbling block.
> 
> Another thing, and I was chatting about this in the lab today, is that
> for particular needs, open source implementations of geospatial
> software
> generally don't have much to offer. The generic capabilities are there,
> or at least enabled for others to program, but special-needs cases
> there
> is not much. The example used today in the lab was CARIS HIPS or SIPS.
> What, if anything, exists in the open source community that could come
> close to the processing capabilities of this?
> 
> Still another area with a lack of development is 3D and 4D modeling /
> rendering / analysis, something like ESRI ArcGlobe with the 3D Analyst
> package or Myriax Eonfusion. There has been very little work in these
> domains which are of particular interest to me. Perhaps the amount of
> people working in these areas is much smaller than the amount of people
> using something more like general analytic capabilities, but it is an
> area that "needs work" nonetheless.
> 
> The point, and I'd like to make this clear, is not the I'm bemoaning
> the
> lack of features and projects in the open source community. I think
> OSGeo and the open source community have done a tremendous job and
> should feel, rightfully, proud at what they have accomplished. However,
> when asked what I'd like to see on the agenda for OSGeo, this is it.
> I'd
> like to see a hard push towards analytics to make the various projects
> we have to offer more directly useful to the average GIS user. In the
> end, it's really about market penetration. The more useful open source
> software is, the better a "deal" it looks like to outsiders and the
> more
> people we'll attract.
> 
> Please note: I don't presume to speak for anyone but myself, IANAL,
> just
> my two cents, your mileage may vary, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.
> 
> Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> > Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo
> over
> > the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the
> matter
> > and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
> > committees, projects, chapters and the board.
> >
> > It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election
> to
> > get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> > Tyler
> >
> > ___
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> >
> 
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Landon Blake]

+1 on the development of local chapters. Strong local chapters will make
for a strong organization.

Question: As local chapters become a more important part of the
organization, how do we encourage collaboration among chapters, so as to
avoid duplicated effort?

Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
 
 

-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Howard Butler
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 8:40 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo


On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the  
> matter
> and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>
> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election  
> to
> get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.


My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in  
the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make  
OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC  
channel can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and  
we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,  
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be  
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have  
been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter  
development and consolidation of the conference.

Howard
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Landon Blake]

Rene wrote: "If we 
were to produce a comprehensive suite of tools offering the standard 
analytical tools as well as some more advanced ones, then these 
proprietary offerings wouldn't look as appealing. Moreover, if we had a 
consolidated toolset which could be used on a multitude of project we 
would not have to re-invent the wheel for each separate project. 
Currently, proprietary software generally offers advanced analytic 
capability out-of-the-box and open source software does not. I see this 
as a bit of a stumbling block."

These are good comments Rene, but I think it is good to consider this issue in 
the context of our overall strategy to "compete" with proprietary GIS software.

It is unlikely that we will ever have the resources as a community to keep up 
with someone like ESRI or Autodesk on functionality. They've got an army of 
paid programmers at their disposal. 

I think a better strategy is the one we are already following: Put into place a 
framework that allows people to easily build their own tools, or to add their 
own functionality. This is something very difficult to do with proprietary 
software, because they want you to pay for those upgrades, they don't want you 
building your own (in most cases). You also don't get to look at the guts of 
the software, which can make it harder to understand how the program works and 
the best way to extend it.

This strategy means we need to focus on a different type of customer. I don't 
think we should be looking for the GIS user that wants a free ESRI clone. We 
should be looking for the GIS user that wants the freedom to expand his 
software's capabilities, or to work with other users to solve a common problem 
in their "domain". We need to foster a community of that type of user, and make 
it as easy as we can for them to migrate from power user to hobby coder.

The real power in computers is not out-of-the-box software that does a million 
(plus one) things, but software that allows you to do exactly what you need.

This is just my own opinion. When I think about how to make OpenJUMP successful 
I know I have to compete on the program's strengths. OJ is never going offer 
all the functionality that ArcView does. However, it can offer a lot that 
ArcView doesn't, and I want to go after the user that is looking for those 
things that are missing in his proprietary software.

Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
 
 

-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of "René A. Enguehard"
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 2:35 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

What I'd like to see within the next 5 years would be more analytical 
tools. Most of the projects in OSGeo are very much enablers: they put 
the facilities in place for people to program their own tools. However, 
as I have noticed over the years, people are reluctant to move to open 
source implementations of geospatial software because they are, in 
effect, losing capabilities. Yes, there is still the potential for the 
same capabilities to be put back in, but the fact remains they just 
aren't there. For example, I have never seen any MCDA, PCA, HotSpot 
Analysis, CART or neural network tools in open source packages. If we 
were to produce a comprehensive suite of tools offering the standard 
analytical tools as well as some more advanced ones, then these 
proprietary offerings wouldn't look as appealing. Moreover, if we had a 
consolidated toolset which could be used on a multitude of project we 
would not have to re-invent the wheel for each separate project. 
Currently, proprietary software generally offers advanced analytic 
capability out-of-the-box and open source software does not. I see this 
as a bit of a stumbling block.

Another thing, and I was chatting about this in the lab today, is that 
for particular needs, open source implementations of geospatial software 
generally don't have much to offer. The generic capabilities are there, 
or at least enabled for others to program, but special-needs cases there 
is not much. The example used today in the lab was CARIS HIPS or SIPS. 
What, if anything, exists in the open source community that could come 
close to the processing capabilities of this?

Still another area with a lack of development is 3D and 4D modeling / 
rendering / analysis, something like ESRI ArcGlobe with the 3D Analyst 
package or Myriax Eonfusion. There has been very little work in these 
domains which are of particular interest to me. Perhaps the amount of 
people working in these areas is much smaller than the amount of people 
using something more like general analytic capabilities, but it is an 
area that "needs work" nonetheless.

The point, and I'd like to make this clear, is not th

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Benjamin Chartier]

Incorporating OGC and ISO standards: +1
Involvement in European projects: +1

What about a stronger involvment in the OGC standardisation process?

Regards,

Benjamin Chartier



Rafal Wawer a écrit :

Development:
Analitic functions +1
cartography  +1

Incorporating OGC and ISO standards, especially in the server/client domain to assure techncial interoperability. 
Upcoming implementation of SEIS and INSPIRE is a good chance to increase the share of FOSS4G on the European market. SEIS is defined officialy so far only with the communication of the EC (COM(2008) 46 final), but already in the communicaiton it is stated ".. information sharing and processing should be supported through common, free opensource software tools.".  OGC WPS and sensor-related standards will certainly play a key role in SEIS setups, although there are already voices that those approved standards do not provide optimal solution from the techncial point of view, nevertheless now they are seen as foundations of the technical interoperability of systems and services.


More mature setup programs - I refer to the OSGEo4W and stand alone Qgis 
installer, where at the beginning of the release in July you need to perform 
silly tricks to be able to use GRASS plugin within QGIS. Good 10% of my gray 
hair come from going around the problems arising from the failure setups during 
the hands-on sessions of summer course on FOSS4G this year. (-;


Other OSGEO initiatives:
Geodata  - certainly a good forum for discussions on the implementation of INSPIRE and availability of free data in Europe. 


Journal - it would be wonderfull if the Journal would became a regular 
scientific print. I am afraid, withour regular issueing and fast editorial 
scheme we won't attract interesting papers and hence journal will not get any 
IF I think we need a clear strategy for the Journal for the upcoming years.

What about OSGEO's involvement in European projects? 


Cheers,
Raf










-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of maning sambale
Sent: 15 September 2009 06:16
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

Libraries and tools that can be used across different OSGEO apps.

data format libraries - done!

algorithm/analytic libraries = +1 . GRASS has an extensive collection.
 Would be good for other OSGEO projects to reuse them.

cartographic libraries = +1


On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Helena Mitasova  
wrote:

On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Howard Butler wrote:


On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo 
over the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on 
the matter and pool a few of the ideas together for further 
discussions amongst committees, projects, chapters and the board.


It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election 
to get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.


My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares 
in the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make 
OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and 
we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs, 
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be 
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have 
been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter 
development and consolidation of the conference.

+1 on these, including OSGeo Edu efforts as another example of
 cross-project collaboration

Helena

Howard
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RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Rafal Wawer]

Development:
Analitic functions +1
cartography  +1

Incorporating OGC and ISO standards, especially in the server/client domain to 
assure techncial interoperability. 
Upcoming implementation of SEIS and INSPIRE is a good chance to increase the 
share of FOSS4G on the European market. SEIS is defined officialy so far only 
with the communication of the EC (COM(2008) 46 final), but already in the 
communicaiton it is stated ".. information sharing and processing should be 
supported through common, free opensource software tools.".  OGC WPS and 
sensor-related standards will certainly play a key role in SEIS setups, 
although there are already voices that those approved standards do not provide 
optimal solution from the techncial point of view, nevertheless now they are 
seen as foundations of the technical interoperability of systems and services.

More mature setup programs - I refer to the OSGEo4W and stand alone Qgis 
installer, where at the beginning of the release in July you need to perform 
silly tricks to be able to use GRASS plugin within QGIS. Good 10% of my gray 
hair come from going around the problems arising from the failure setups during 
the hands-on sessions of summer course on FOSS4G this year. (-;


Other OSGEO initiatives:
Geodata  - certainly a good forum for discussions on the implementation of 
INSPIRE and availability of free data in Europe. 

Journal - it would be wonderfull if the Journal would became a regular 
scientific print. I am afraid, withour regular issueing and fast editorial 
scheme we won't attract interesting papers and hence journal will not get any 
IF I think we need a clear strategy for the Journal for the upcoming years.

What about OSGEO's involvement in European projects? 

Cheers,
Raf










-Original Message-
From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] 
On Behalf Of maning sambale
Sent: 15 September 2009 06:16
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

Libraries and tools that can be used across different OSGEO apps.

data format libraries - done!

algorithm/analytic libraries = +1 . GRASS has an extensive collection.
 Would be good for other OSGEO projects to reuse them.

cartographic libraries = +1


On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Helena Mitasova  
wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Howard Butler wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo 
>>> over the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on 
>>> the matter and pool a few of the ideas together for further 
>>> discussions amongst committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>>>
>>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election 
>>> to get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
>>
>>
>> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares 
>> in the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
>> - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make 
>> OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel 
>> can't.
>> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and 
>> we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
>> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs, 
>> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be 
>> fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have 
>> been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter 
>> development and consolidation of the conference.
>
> +1 on these, including OSGeo Edu efforts as another example of
>  cross-project collaboration
>
> Helena
>>
>> Howard
>> ___
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
> ___
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> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>



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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[G. Allegri]

>
> Libraries and tools that can be used across different OSGEO apps.
>
>

+1, from a software point of view.
I can compare my experience as a user and programmer in the last five years
with OSGeo (and other FOSS tools) against my parallel experience with
ArcGIS, Erdas, Isatis, etc. A very sinthetic resume:

Many people are aware of the potentialities of many OSGeo softwares, thanks
also to foundation libraries like GDAL. The problem is the step from
potential to daily use. I know that ideally everyone could contribute to
higher level features (sponsorship, dev, testing, docs, etc.), but the step
from ideality to practice still keeps many practitioners bound to more
integrated, full featured, softwares (first of all ArcGIS).
I see a main problem to this: FOSS gis still suffers lack of data model and
user experirence consistency. The OS freedom is a coin: one face shows all
the benefits of independent communities, etc. while the other makes it
appear a big confused arena to the most users... I would support more and
more the development and sharing of low level, generic libraries.
algorithms, cartograhpic, but also data structures (I'm working hard to
produce a seemless integration between SAGA and QGis, and the work is
prominently dedicated to this).
This would facilitate the OSGeo software integration and so the building of
full featured products (QGis GUI + GRASS/SAGA algorithms + R analysis + 
= something more similar to commercial stacks), and would help the
interfacing with the rest of the world.

+1 for OSGeo Edu, and the Journal.

giovanni
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[maning sambale]

Libraries and tools that can be used across different OSGEO apps.

data format libraries - done!

algorithm/analytic libraries = +1 . GRASS has an extensive collection.
 Would be good for other OSGEO projects to reuse them.

cartographic libraries = +1


On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Helena Mitasova
 wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Howard Butler wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
>>> the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter
>>> and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
>>> committees, projects, chapters and the board.
>>>
>>> It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to
>>> get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.
>>
>>
>> My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in the
>> next 3-5 years are the following three items:
>> - Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make OSGeo
>> real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't.
>> - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and we
>> start to use it our central fundraising piece.
>> - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,
>> benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be fostered by
>> us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have been OSGeo's biggest
>> accomplishments along with the local chapter development and consolidation
>> of the conference.
>
> +1 on these, including OSGeo Edu efforts as another example of
>  cross-project collaboration
>
> Helena
>>
>> Howard
>> ___
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
> ___
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> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>



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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Helena Mitasova]

On Sep 14, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Howard Butler wrote:



On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo  
over
the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the  
matter

and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.

It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming  
election to

get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.



My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares  
in the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make  
OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC  
channel can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years,  
and we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,  
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be  
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have  
been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter  
development and consolidation of the conference.


+1 on these, including OSGeo Edu efforts as another example of  cross- 
project collaboration


Helena


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Howard Butler]

On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:


Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the  
matter

and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.

It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election  
to

get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.



My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in  
the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make  
OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC  
channel can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and  
we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,  
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be  
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have  
been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter  
development and consolidation of the conference.


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[René A. Enguehard]

What I'd like to see within the next 5 years would be more analytical 
tools. Most of the projects in OSGeo are very much enablers: they put 
the facilities in place for people to program their own tools. However, 
as I have noticed over the years, people are reluctant to move to open 
source implementations of geospatial software because they are, in 
effect, losing capabilities. Yes, there is still the potential for the 
same capabilities to be put back in, but the fact remains they just 
aren't there. For example, I have never seen any MCDA, PCA, HotSpot 
Analysis, CART or neural network tools in open source packages. If we 
were to produce a comprehensive suite of tools offering the standard 
analytical tools as well as some more advanced ones, then these 
proprietary offerings wouldn't look as appealing. Moreover, if we had a 
consolidated toolset which could be used on a multitude of project we 
would not have to re-invent the wheel for each separate project. 
Currently, proprietary software generally offers advanced analytic 
capability out-of-the-box and open source software does not. I see this 
as a bit of a stumbling block.


Another thing, and I was chatting about this in the lab today, is that 
for particular needs, open source implementations of geospatial software 
generally don't have much to offer. The generic capabilities are there, 
or at least enabled for others to program, but special-needs cases there 
is not much. The example used today in the lab was CARIS HIPS or SIPS. 
What, if anything, exists in the open source community that could come 
close to the processing capabilities of this?


Still another area with a lack of development is 3D and 4D modeling / 
rendering / analysis, something like ESRI ArcGlobe with the 3D Analyst 
package or Myriax Eonfusion. There has been very little work in these 
domains which are of particular interest to me. Perhaps the amount of 
people working in these areas is much smaller than the amount of people 
using something more like general analytic capabilities, but it is an 
area that "needs work" nonetheless.


The point, and I'd like to make this clear, is not the I'm bemoaning the 
lack of features and projects in the open source community. I think 
OSGeo and the open source community have done a tremendous job and 
should feel, rightfully, proud at what they have accomplished. However, 
when asked what I'd like to see on the agenda for OSGeo, this is it. I'd 
like to see a hard push towards analytics to make the various projects 
we have to offer more directly useful to the average GIS user. In the 
end, it's really about market penetration. The more useful open source 
software is, the better a "deal" it looks like to outsiders and the more 
people we'll attract.


Please note: I don't presume to speak for anyone but myself, IANAL, just 
my two cents, your mileage may vary, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.


Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:

Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter
and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.  


It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to
get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.

Best wishes,
Tyler

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[OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter
and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.  

It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to
get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.

Best wishes,
Tyler

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