01 Mar 2007
Lots of interesting tidbits from the conference organizing front:
- We have added Leica Geosystems as a sponsor. Like Safe Software, Leica is proprietary software company that makes use of open source in their developments. I’m looking forward to hearing both companies articulate their vision for engaging more with their respective communities.
- I got to take a tour of the Royal BC Museum galleries where we’ll be having our Wednesday evening reception. The First Peoples Gallery looks great, some amazing totem poles and carvings in the central room, and of course the Natural History Gallery has the really cool animal displays my daughter loves so much (oh, the whispered terror of the Mammoth!)
- The Call for Workshops has gone really well, with over 30 submissions so far, and a slight extension to allow a few more to trickle in. Reading over the evaluations of the 2006 conference, it is clear that the hands-on workshops are what really set FOSS4G apart from other conferences. Yes, sir, sit down at that computer and try out that software – and take it home with you when you’re done, please.
14 Feb 2007
I don’t know whether to be delighted or frightened, but Google has put in place the final part of the publish-find-bind contract for a Google SDI.
Now people can publish their data in the new universal format, Google’s KML. I can find that data using a Google search. And I can bind to that data using Google’s clients — Google Earth and Google Maps.
I guess this speaks to the importance of a useful working prototype in building out collaborative technology with wide adoption. If Tim Berners-Lee had been content to just write down the specs for HTTP and HTML, we probably wouldn’t have the web (maybe we’d have a huge network built on gopher… now that would be cool). But he didn’t just do that, he built a working system at Cern that did useful stuff with HTTP and HTML, and the people at other sites could take and use too, freely.
Time to retrofit all our software to publish KML!
10 Feb 2007
Not a geospatial post, but… I fired up my home accounting software today, to get caught up in preparation for tax time, and look what greeted me:
Intuit is going to shut down all the internet services associated with my copy of Quicken for Mac. But good news! I can upgrade to Quicken 2007 for only $50 and keep my services! Yay!
Holy corporate screwings, Batman! Nice way to drive the upgrade process, Intuit, but a little tough on the customer loyalty — I feel like a beast being driven over Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. Gotta make those quarterly numbers.
Time to research alternatives — deeds like this should not go unpunished.
06 Feb 2007
This aught to be fun! I just typed “foss4g” into Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=foss4g
And as of now (February 5, 2007), FOSS4G2007 is on the first search page, near the bottom, which is good but not terrific. FOSS4G2006 is #1, which is not surprising. In the middle we have some interesting stuff, like highly regarded blogs that have mentioned FOSS4G recently, or not.
It will be fun to watch the 2007 event climb the page as the buzz grows, month by month!
05 Feb 2007
I have not said much about it, blog-wise, but one of the big things I am doing this year is chairing the FOSS4G 2007 conference, which will be in Victoria from September 24-27.
We got off to a late start (compared to most conferences), only getting official approval at the end of 2006, so January 2007 was really the start of organizing. I decided to spend the first month concentrating on sponsorship, since so many other decisions are dependent on available resources — knowing how much sponsorship is available is really helpful. It has been a great month! We are going to meet our budget targets for sure, and maybe substantially exceed them.
Committed sponsors so far are:
-
Platinum
-
Gold
- Google
- Refractions
- DM Solutions
- BC Integrated Land Management Bureau
- Safe Software
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Silver
- Pacific Alliance Technologies
- Open Geospatial Consortium
- City of Nanaimo
And there are more in the pipeline!
Today the Call for Workshops went out too, which marks the start of our program activities. We have already confirmed Damian Conway as our keynote speaker – an excellent speaker on open source topics, I am really looking forward to that talk.
Unfortunately the web site does not yet reflect some of the cooler things we have planned for the conference this year:
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Integration’o’rama
- A live integration demonstration on the exhibition hall floor, exhibitors will have the opportunity to show their products interacting with products from other exhibitors in real time! Refractions will provide a PostGIS database instance, full of data from BC ILMB, which web mapping servers will render, and desktop apps will edit, and web frameworks will provide wrapped access to, and so on and so on. Unlike proprietary vendors, open source vendors have to interoperate, because no one has a complete stack to sell.
-
Demonstration Theatre
- More conventional, but a first for FOSS4G. Since we have a real show floor, we can have a real demonstration theatre and get exhibitors and projects to show their software strutting its stuff on the big screen.
-
Friday Code Sprint
- At the end of the conference we will be retaining some space and internet connectivity so that projects can get together in one room and plan or hack or just talk for an extended period. The internet is great, but face-to-face is the highest bandwidth connection available.
Last year, 535 people came to Lausanne for FOSS4G2006 (including me!). It was a great event, but far away from the USA and Canada. It has now been over two years since a North American open source geo-spatial get together (last time was Minnesota in June 2005).
So much has happened since then!
Autodesk has joined the community, Mapguide is going great guns, slippy maps have transformed web mapping, the desktop apps are all making huge strides, PostGIS has been OGC certified, Oracle has started buying open source companies…
It is a new world, and FOSS4G 2007 is going to be the place to take the pulse of that new world.
