Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

It’s funny how you can have a fairly quiet time of things, then suddenly everything happens in one week…

So Monday was the first Open Source GIS conference in the UK, affectionately known to it’s friends as OSGIS 2009. The event was sold out in advance (150 people) ,  and seemed to be well received, though it was hectic, with two streams and workshops going on through most of the day.  I quite enjoyed the quick-fire aspect of the talks, with most being limited to 15-30 minutes. Perhaps my favourite was from Rob Booth, who talked about using Open Source for Spire- the UK Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA)  SDI. While there were issues with scaling, the flexibility, response and community/developer support were all big plus points in choosing that solution. This is a good counter-example to bring up whenever anyone says that open source is just for the little guys.

We had the first AGM of the OSGeo UK local chapter after the conference, and many thanks to those hardy souls who stayed around for it. The main point of discussion was whether the chapter should become an ‘organisation’, in the voluntary sense, which would allow us to have a bank account and various useful things like that. We also discussed putting a bid together for FOSS4G in 2011, and decided that 2012 would be a better bet, it being Olympic year and all that. Mateusz had some really good points to make about using social networking to get people involved, and the idea of having informal get-togethers outside of the big conferences. So- we now have a linkedin group, a facebook group and some tools for helping people plan meetups will be following shortly. Lunch-time pub get-togethers were very popular. Can’t imagine why… join the groups though- the more the merrier!

So- to next year. Bigger, better, and shinier. There’s a date for OSGIS 2010 already, and plans are afoot to spread it over 1.5 days, with an afternoon of workshops either before the main event or after it. See you there!

A quick post to give people a heads up that there seems to be a google groups problem affecting the portable-gis group, amongst others.

If you have signed up with a googlemail account (not gmail, or any other email account) then your messages may get bounced back with a permissions error.  This seems to be a general problem affecting many groups, so no doubt a fix is in progress, but just so you know, I’m not blocking anyone (hell, I can’t post to my own group at the moment!).

What do you mean exactly? I’m not sure I agree with all of Seth Godin’s examples, particularly his comments about standards, but this shows just how much of a buzz-word “Open” has become. Once you’ve got your terminology sorted, head over here for a cultural band-wagon to jump on. Personally, I’d rather see Open Source adoption in terms of people seeing the light rather than simply admitting defeat, but it does mean there’s hope in the long run…

You might have seen this post last week about how the Ordnance Survey once again saved the universe from un-approved uses of “their” data, by blocking an incredibly useful application that overlays Ordnance Survey mapping over Google Earth. You might have seen this post about it too. You might even have written to the Ordnance Survey to complain about it.

However, unless, like me, you had these posts tagged in your feed reader ready to write something about them, you might not have realised that the Ordnance Survey have (sort of) relented.  I say “sort of”, because apparently there’s still an issue between the terms of Google Earth’s license and that of the Ordnance Survey, but at least Gavin gets his API key back again.

Power to the people!