I’ve been out at a couple of Association for Geographic Information (AGI) events over the last couple of weeks- organised by their Northern Group. Their main function is to organised events in the North of England (hence the name), but the outgoing chairman Rollo, has been really pushing for events with a national attendance and relevance. I spoke briefly at both events, and my talks can be found on slideshare and on my talks page here.

The first event, a couple of weeks ago now, was Where2Now- a lively scamper through some leading edge ideas, mainly about geographic location for the masses rather than technical GIS per se (yes, I’m trying to avoid using the word NeoGeography, but that’s what I’m talking about). There were speakers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap, Geovation, Ordnance Survey- in fact if you attended the Geoweb stream at the main AGI conference you’ll have a good idea who spoke! I did a short talk on the impact of “open” (access/source/data) as a disruptive technology (as far as I’m concerned this neo/mashup/open era wouldn’t be here without it), and attempted to demo a couple of deeply cool new toys that we’re working with at the moment- mapchat and gvsigmobile, both of which I think have the potential to be incredibly useful and really big. Unfortunately my laptop had stage fright and refused to speak to the monitor, so I couldn’t do a live demo of gvsigmobile as I wanted to.

Perhaps my favourite talk of the day was John McKerrell, talking about mapme.at, with his geo-clock (if you’ve read Harry Potter, remember the Weasley’s clock, with hands for each member of the family pointing to where they are at any given moment). Luckily John hasn’t found a need for a “mortal peril” setting yet! Mapme.at is great- it’s one of those ideas which can only work with the ubiquitous nature of geolocation these days, in phones, and with all the geo-location apis that you can use. Basically it’s a way of mapping where you are, and of plotting your location history, using feeds from twitter, email, google latitude, fire eagle etc.  Someone asked what it could be used for, but I think that’s missing the point somewhat- John has provided the basic idea,  and it’s up to the user to figure out what to do with it!

Again, the #geocom twitter stream going on in the background provided an interesting counter-point to the talks, although it’s increasingly worrying as a speaker not knowing if there’s a discussion about how rubbish you are going on while you’re giving the talk!

The second event I attended last week was a World GIS Day event at the Grammar School in Leeds. This followed on from the incredibly successful closing presentation at the main AGI conference, in which kids from the school, and a couple of their teachers discussed the way in which GIS is used throughout the whole school. The event last week was a chance for professional GIS users to talk a little about the way in which they use GIS, and also to see in more detail how GIS is used in the school. We also attended part of a sixth-form geography lesson, which was really interesting (not the least for the looks of abject trauma on all the attendee’s faces at sitting in a class room again after many years).

With my “open” hat on, I was quite uneasy about the way in which ESRI is synonymous with GIS in that environment, but to be fair it’s because they have worked extremely hard to provide the material for the teachers, which isn’t yet available anywhere else. My other concern was that teaching GIS seemed to be more about teaching which buttons to press to get a particular result, rather than teaching the theory and asking the kids how to figure it out *in that particular software package*. My “open source” side is frustrated that they are producing a generation of kids who will think ESRI is the only GIS to use, and when they are in  a position to influence the use of GIS themselves, within organisations,  or other schools, that’s the route they will choose. However, where in a school curriculum is the chance to give kids a choice, and how can open source provide them with that? Things to think about…

… or there again, there might not!

This is just a heads up for a couple of events/workshops that I’m involved in over the next couple of weeks and months.

Firstly, next Tuesday is the AGI Northern Group Where2.0Now one-day conference, at GeoPlan in Harrogate. If you want to know what this whole “neogeography” thing is, and what it means to you, then be there or be terribly antiquated. There are some great speakers lined up (and me, but beggars can’t be choosers), and it’s looking like a good day. With luck and a fair wind I will have “cool things” to show too…

Secondly, in January 2010 I’m helping on a 2-day workshop at Lancaster University on open source GIS. We did this last year, and it was well received, so it’s getting a reprisal. There’s a flyer here, and you can book here. For UK higher ed or other educational types, it’s pretty cheap if you ask me, and the food’s good too.

Hope you can make it to one or both of these.

I also did a talk last week to local government types, on how open source GIS could be viable within their organisation. The slides are up on slideshare if you’re interested!

To keynote or not to keynote… I chose not, so missed out on the triumvirate of ESRI, Ordnance Survey and Pitney Bowes and instead watched a series of talks ostensibly on “the GeoWeb” instead.  By the time Andy Allen from Cloudmade finished his talk I felt like I’d been run over by an unstoppable OpenStreetMap juggernaut (in a nice way, you understand). I had a bit of an epiphany about their flexible data paradigm, after all, how could you tag a road in the West Bank as one-way if you’re Palestinian and two-way if you’re Israeli without it? More “Open” from John McKerrell from mapme.at, talking about the OSM alternative to Google StreetView, imaginatively entitled “OpenStreetView“. It’s at an early stage but promises a lot, and they are addressing privacy concerns quite nicely.

Martin Daly of CadCorp won the award for the most interesting title (Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria), and of course gets points for showing the actual clip from Ghostbusters where that quote comes from. The main thing I took away from his talk about neo and palaeo was that it’s all still geography regardless of what label you put on it, and that it should be about what’s good, not what’s new.

Brian Norman from Earthware did a great talk about creating applications for Real Estate and Travel, hampered only by the fact that he had to do a live silverlight plugin installation. I hadn’t really thought explicitly about the way Estate Agents would want to censor mapping data (showing you the nice park nearby, but not the nightclub). I also hadn’t considered their need for more detailed, up to date imagery to ensure that, as the visitor, you’re not put off by out of date pictures of half-built extensions, or the dreaded grey box telling you to zoom out.

Winner of the best presentation, as voted by the punters, was the BBC with their Story-telling on Maps. It’s amazing what you can do with the might of the BBC R and D department, and lots of help from the Ordnance Survey! To be fair, what they have produced is a very slick API for tying movement on the map to actions in a video, and it’s incredibly well presented. There was a collective gasp from the audience when they rotated a piece of raster mapping, and the text stayed at the correct rotation… (a gift from the OS and not something us mere mortals can do).

I thought it was a little unfair that the afternoon’s sessions from Ed Parsons and Peter ter Haar were changed on the hoof from simple back to back presentations to some sort of boxing match. Ed got to deliver the presentation he had prepared, whereas Peter had to ad lib responses whilst trying to give his own talk. Having said that, Ed’s demonstration of the idiocy of derived data was an absolute masterpiece and Peter didn’t stand much of a chance. This is a shame as he was trying to launch some fairly innovative (for the OS) new products including (finally) OS on Demand- a service based delivery system for data.

The concluding plenary put a lot of the previous presentations to shame. 15 and 17 year olds from Leeds Grammar School, along with two of their teachers, presented on the use of GIS within all aspects of their curriculum, not just geography. It really was great to see GIS being used so innovatively, and though there was some unease on the twitter back channel about the ESRI influence, that shouldn’t detract from their achievements.

On to the concluding remarks and prizes.  Steven Feldman stepped down as conference chair, and seemed genuinely sorry to go. Everyone, in fact, seemed genuinely sorry to see the end of the conference. I think the organising team got the “community” aspect just right this time round, even more so than last year.

My own take on the trends from this year- OSM, all over the place, and in particular Walking Papers. The neo/palaeo debate, even amongst people who claimed not to care. Frustration about Ordnance Survey derived data and licensing. Twitter as a valid conference tool. All things beginning with geo. Roll on next year…

The AGI conference last week in Stratford-upon-Avon was well worth attending, with (I thought) a really good vibe and some great presentations. I thought the twitter feed, new for this year, was a real hit, as was the ability to see talks online via slideshare soon after they had been given. The twitter feed in particular gave you a chance to see what other people watching the same presentation were thinking, and occasionally caused some jealousy as people realised they’d picked the less interesting track!

Steven Feldman’s final introduction as chairman of the conference is probably a good place to start for a feel for how it went. Attendance was up from last year (600+), which was reassuring, given the financial circumstances, with a more international spread of attendees- great for a predominantly UK-based conference. He said it was no longer about “how” you did something, in other words using packages X and Y, but “why”.

The conference tagline was “Realising the Value of Place”, which is quite clever and multi-faceted. “Place” is not the same as “location”. It’s about asking why people feel happier in one place than another, and why life-expectancy differs between London Boroughs. “Value” can also be taken in a number of ways. There’s the value of a place, mentioned above, but also as an industry in a recession we need to learn how to get financial value from what we do, and controversially, how to get value from “free” (Steven’s term, not mine), as it’s not going to go away (Yay).

The two keynotes, from Peter Batty and Andrew Turner were also interesting. Peter described the current climate as a geospatial revolution, as the industry migrates from the more established mainstream technologies such as desktop GIS to more disruptive technology such as the web and crowd-sourcing. This was the first mention of OpenStreetmap, and in particular Walking Papers, but believe me it wasn’t the last…

Andrew Turner stirred the Neo/Palaeo pot (again not the last time this came up), but perhaps came closest to defining the difference between the two- as a shift from tool-centric to user-centric. Actually this ties in very well with Steven’s comments about moving from the “how” to the “why”, and also with Peter’s comments about disruptive technologies. I think the one thing that’s very clear is that it is a total mind-set shift, and people (or organisations) that don’t adapt or evolve will be become irrelevant. Someone asked the question “how do we make money from this?”, and again there is a total shift here. Massive license fees simply won’t work in a market where people know about crowd-sourcing, free data and micro-payments a la iPhone apps.

Surprisingly, the best paper I saw in the two days, and a deserved winner of the committees best paper, and a runner up for the attendee’s best presentation, was Robert Barr’s talk on Core Reference Geographies (CRG). I didn’t even know such things existed till then, though logically they should. From the UK’s Location Strategy these are: “Commonly used geographic datasets that provide a framework for linking and integrating other geo-referenced information as well as providing key contextual information”.The establishment of CRG in the UK have been talked about for several years, but only ever talked about, yet they should be absolutely fundamental. There needs to be a cost/benefit study for creating these CRG and making them available, and also an analysis of what it costs not to do it. Robert made the comparison between the CRG and other Core Reference datasets such as DNS. The same sort of funding method (pay for inclusion but not for use) could potentially be used to fund the CRG. The one negative point I had was the lack of reference to the spatial data themes talked about in the INSPIRE directive, as it seems to make sense to ensure that these (if mandated) are all core datasets.

Another stand-out presentation on Day One was on the historical development of “place” by Martin Laker. He talked about how current boundaries in fact have a heritage going back to the Black Death, and even earlier. Clearly the geography of the UK has always been tangled up and complicated (cf with the difficulty in setting up the CRGs), so all government has to do now is blame it on the Plague…

James Cutler from emapsite presented on the Geoweb’s cultural heritage (sorry, can’t find the link), but I got frustrated when he basically dismissed the problem of data licensing by saying that it’s not really all that expensive. It became clear to me that archaeology, and perhaps other environmental disciplines, have a use-case that is totally under-represented in the great licensing debate.

Day One concluded with the GeoCommunity Soapbox, a new invention for this conference. Speakers were given 5 minutes and 15 equally spaced slides, to talk about anything “geo” that they wanted. When coupled with a live view of the twitter feed and free geobeer this was a recipe for carnage and I think it’s probably good that the wifi (and hence the twitter feed) collapsed under the strain early in the proceedings. The best soapbox rant was definitely Ian Painter’s, now a veritable internet sensation.

General trends- lots of Neo/Palaeo discussion, despite exhortations that “I’m not Neo/Palaeo (delete as appropriate) but…”. This mind-shift clearly worries a lot of people, and the industry is in a process of change as it tries to re-position itself. OpenStreetMap and allied projects are definitely on the up. The back-channels (twitter in particular) were just as important as the presentations and the face-to-face discussions.

Day Two to follow…

Just a quick note to say that I’ve been away on holiday for a fortnight, in gorgeous Orkney in the far north of Scotland. A fortnight of absolutely no computers (apart from downloading digital photos), wandering around beautiful islands with sandy beaches (OK, mostly in the driving wind or pouring rain), visiting Chambered Cairns, drinking whiskey and generally chilling out. I have to say that I very much enjoyed disengaging from technology, information streams and general online interaction very much, so obviously needed the break! I’d post a photo or two but haven’t got round to QA-ing them all yet!

I’m off to the AGI conference in Stratford this afternoon, and would welcome the opportunity to meet up with folk while I’m there- we’re intending some kind of informal OSGeo UK meetup on Thursday but I’ll be around for both days. I’ll blog about the conference while I’m there if I get the chance.

As someone else said recently, the advantage of catching up on several weeks of RSS posts all at once is that you see some trends and relationships that you’d probably miss otherwise. One that caught my eye was this, from Martin Daly, in response to a long and thought-provoking piece on open source by Ian Bicking. Without trying to second-guess either Ian or Martin, it’s clear that there are always going to be different motivations for adopting and working with open source. Via a tortuous chain of links I revisited this post of Paul Ramsey’s from last year, responding to a Jack Dangermond interview, in which open source is mentioned and summarily dismissed. Paul is uneasy with the political connotations of calling open source a “movement”, but for some people that’s clearly what it is.

I’m beginning to see open source as being a choice similar to choosing organic food, or going green. For some people, this is a political movement. For others, nothing else makes any logical sense. For others, it’s a purely market-driven decision, and I’m sure there are many more motivations. The different camps don’t always sit nicely together, and occasionally see each other as harming the general cause. But we should all take heart from the fact that going green used to be the province of the yoghurt-eating, hemp-wearing hippies, but we’re all recycling and changing our light-bulbs to energy savers (and even eating yoghurt and wearing hemp) now.

I attended (and spoke at) the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Technical Special Interest Group Open Source Event yesterday- down at the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge (I want to work there, they have skiddoos parked in their carpark). The event was designed to kick off the newly invigorated Tech SIG, after a hiatus of several years. I can understand why there was a hiatus- the other SIGs have a more defined focus, such as the Environment, or Crime and Disorder and so on. The Technical SIG covers all areas, from a methodological point of view at least, and yet doesn’t want to tread on the other group’s feet.

Anyhow, the Open Source event was fairly well attended- with 30-odd people there, most of whom were new to the group, which bodes well. Alongside my own talk (on “Going Open-available on the talks page), there were talks from Paul Cooper (a roadmap of Open Source components for GIS web services and clients, and the South Georgia GIS) and Andrew Fleming from the BAS (access and delivery of Polar Satellite Imagery), Andrew Mackay from IPL (Using Open Source software in operational systems) and Gillan Arnold and Egbe Equavoen from the Ordnance Survey (OS Web Map tools).

A general observation- almost everyone talked about using some combination of geoserver/postgresql/openlayers. Other packages were mentioned in passing, but these were the big 3, the packages du jour. That’s not to say that there aren’t perfectly viable alternatives, but these ones definitely seem to have the momentum at the moment. It was nice to spread the word about mapfish though, which most people hadn’t heard of!

Andrew Mackay talked about using open source to deliver crime mapping to Kent Police. The thing about Andrew’s talk that stood out was the discussion about software development cycles. At first glance this seems like overkill for the majority of small-scale mapping applications. But then IPL are involved in some very large-scale application development, and probably understand more than most the need to get it exactly right.  I did begin to think that a little more discipline in my software development would be a good idea, even if the full cycle as per the textbook is a little too much!

Andrew Fleming’s talk about Polar satellite imagery was interesting. He raised a lot of issues around the delivery of the imagery, as near to real-time as possible, with less than brilliant communication lines (not much broadband in Antarctica).  For their needs, georss was a better bet than wms, due to speed and the size of the data set. They are still looking for a solution for deploying 3D and radar data, but have yet to come up with an optimal solution. Answers on a penguin to…

The demo of the Ordnance Survey’s web mapping tools was interesting, but ultimately frustrating because whatever you do with it you’re still hamstrung by the data license. The basic tool itself is a integrated postgresql/openlayers setup, with some nice extras for cutting their mapping tiles into handy chunks, and built-in geocoding (if you have the license…). I was hoping to hear that they are ready to start rolling out wms access to their data with an innovative new pricing structure, but no, so I’ll keep waiting for that.

The end discussion revolved around people’s concerns over the “risk” of open source either in general or in their organisation, and the need for traditional support agreements. In simple terms there was a basic division between those organisations with in-house IT staff who were quite flexible and willing to try out, or see the advantage of, open source tools, versus those who had out-sourced their IT to external companies with 3 or 5 year contracts to use particular packages. It’s a chicken and egg scenario put far more succinctly by other people than I ever can- but basically without the critical mass of open source adopters, how can large “traditional support companies” be supported?

All in all, an enjoyable and informative day.

Here’s the google docs version of the talk I gave at the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference. It’s more of a general discussion on the preconceptions and limiting factors in the uptake of open source GIS in the UK rather than a run down of what’s available.

Note that I’m hoping to put up a page with pdfs of all of my GIS-related talks pretty soon, so pop back for the downloadable version with notes…

OK, day two of the AGI conference. This started with three more excellent keynotes, from Charlie Pattinson of the Environment Agency, Charles Kenelly of ESRI and Stuart Haynes of the Defence Geographic Centre.

Charlie’s post was about flood risk management in a changing world. This begs a question posed initially by Steve Feldman in his opening speech as conference chair- are we shaping the world or being shaped by it? This is highlighted by the fact that people used to talk about flood defence, now we talk about management. it’s no longer possible to defend against floods, only mitigate the risk they cause. The 2007 Pitt review had some recommendations to make about GIS, amongst other things- though I find it quite odd that it takes a massive flood and an expensive review to tell them that they need to establish better methods of sharing data between organisations. We (in the UK) also have three separate initiatives all about sharing information in government- Inspire, the Athens Initiative, and the Location Strategy. Surely it would be better just to get on with it? I digress, however- it was a sobering and interesting talk that warned about complacency- most flooding last year was caused by the drainage system being overwhelmed, not by surface water. I certainly felt guilty as I always assumed I’d be fine living half way up a hill!

Charles Kennelly from ESRI UK talked about “GIS beyond barriers”. Most barriers to traditional GIS have now gone, but there are new barriers instead. These are things like the user interface, data sharing, and an understanding of data confidence and quality. Furthermore, GIS has become much more familiar to people, but is still seen as an addendum to most business processes rather than an integral part, and it must become more integrated to achieve it’s full potential.  As an example of how GIS should be integrated, Charles showed a case study from the Foresty Commission, which hid all the maps behind an outlook-like interface so as not to scare the accountants.

I was most impressed with the work of the Defense Geographic Centre, who provide all the mapping for the UK military operations in Afghanistan, for example. The rapid turn-around that they need, and the constant need to adapt to changing requests from “the theatre” were astounding. One example particularly struck me, about the need to provide detailed off-road contour information, classified into what was safe to drive on and what was not, because it is no longer safe to drive on the roads. Again, this shows that we as GIS specialists are being shaped by the world as much as we are shaping it.

So, to the controversial paper of the day. Mark Bishop of Mapinfo did a paper on “The Hype of Web 2.0″, which won best paper. It was possibly the least geographically-related, and a number of people have expressed suprise as to why it won. I liked it, but did feel that he glossed over some things that are actually fairly important in what we do. For a start, metadata and tagging are apparently one and the same and were invented by Tim O’Reilly. I totally disagree with this- they are really the antithesis of each other (but can be used together very well). Metadata is about data veracity and quality, and should (if done properly) be totally reliable. Tagging is about loose, flexible aggregations of data, and tells you nothing about how reliable your data is, or whether it’s fit for purpose.

I did agree with the way in which Mark applied the Web 2.0 paradigm to mapping. Priorities should be interoperability and useability, and only then additional features. Colleagues/customers and clients all have different expectations of mapping now because they have been exposed to the Google Effect. It’s important that we recognise that. I also like the notion of participation as opposed to publishing.

The final talk that I attended was from Nick Black, talking about Cloudmade and Openstreetmap. His thoughts on the changing business model that free data provides were really interesting- basically the value (monetary?) is pushed further up the train to the third-party applications and devices. He also made the very good point that maps are only useful if they are reliable. Now, to me that chimes slightly awkwardly with the openstreetmap approach (you don’t have a measure of completeness) but when I spoke to Nick afterwards he said the Cloudmade were looking at that sort of thing, which is very interesting indeed. He also pointed out that Cloudmade also have shapefile downloads of openstreetmap data, so I guess I’ll have to amend my post on that from a couple of days ago…

I missed most of the “Big Debate” in the afternoon so I can’t really add to the analysis that has been written elsewhere on the subject, although I can see where they are coming from. Any reservations that people have had though, have been related to general attitudes rather than to the conference itself,  so I guess the Debate has worked on one level because people have gone away to talk about it. Maybe next year attitudes will have changed!

Day one of the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference began with the Keynote Speeches from Sean Phelan of Multimap, Vanessa Lawrence of the Ordnance Survey, and Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk. Sean Phelan had some really interesting insights based on his experience of founding multimap and surviving the dot-com boom, through to the recent acquisition by microsoft. He coined possibly the stand-out quote of the conference: “We are the last generation who will ever know what it means to be lost” , referring to the rising ubiquity of location-based technology and GPS. What I liked most about Sean’s talk was the bigger picture outlook exploring the rise and take-up of new ideas and technology, and his predictions for the next few years. Reassuringly, he thought that there was still a place for big and small companies, and that no single company would lead.

Vanessa Lawrence also used a good term (new to me)- the idea of the “Prosumer”, someone who takes ownership of data and interacts with it rather than simply consuming. This is not a new idea (in fact it’s quite Web 2.0) but it’s nice to have a term for it! Most interestingly, Vanessa talked about a new Ordnance Survey service for delivering mapping data by WMS. While we have been an age waiting for this to actually happen, and we don’t know what the licensing/pricing model will be like, it’s still great news.

Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk, as always gave a very thought-provoking talk, with lots of very striking visuals, about building for a sustainable future. This focussed on how new GIS tools, particularly 3D can help in this process.

Tim Warr, also of multimap, tried to fire us all up right from the start with the provocative idea that web-mapping had killed traditional GIS. Except in the end he said that it hadn’t, so no fight there then! Tim made the point that since 90% of GIS users only use 10% of the functionality of GIS, why not just give them the 10%. This is what Google have done, and it obviously works really well- for low-level GIS use by consumers. He went on to show some very nice web-based mapping, computing travel times, but really that only moves the functionality from 10-11%, and you have to build a new application for every extra bit of usage. For s atart that doesn’t seem like good use of code or time, why not build something more flexible? Tim said that coding was the skills area to focus on now, but really I think that devalues traditional GIS.

In the afternoon I went to a series of lectures on various business-oriented aspects of GIS, or rather managing GIS. I have to admit that most of it went right over my head, but there was some useful information on how to market GIS projects from Steve Calder of PA Consulting and Keith Wishart from ESRI, and on how the procurement process works from both sides by Tony Boobier, ex of Mapinfo.

Finally, in the last session I went to Graeme Gould’s talk on using postgresql in the Grand Union Housing Group, which was really useful for tips on what we might do at Oxford Archaeology, and then I got to give my talk on Open Source GIS in the UK, which seemed to go OK really! I’ll put it up online when I get a chance…

The evening entertainment, in the form of an 80s disco complete with bucking bronco and scaletrix, was clearly designed to be deeply symbolic and reflective of the state of the economy and competition in the market place, or so it seemed as tiredness and alcohol kicked in. Whatever it meant, a good time was had by all!

I’m just back from the AGi Geocommunity 2008 conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. A very enjoyable time was had by all I think! I would have posted from the conference itself, but the hotel wifi wasn’t keen on playing with my linux laptop.

I’ll talk more in other posts about the actual presentations, but this is just some of my general thoughts about the conference.

My overall thought was that the AGI got it right with this event. I went into it with some reservations, partly because I was talking about open source at a conference full of software vendors, and partly  because I am pretty new to the AGI and didn’t know what to expect.

From talking to people throughout the event, as well as the entertainment that they put on, I really did feel that they were trying to get a sense of community, breaking down barriers between vendors and users. I also felt that if open source gis software is to become more widely used, it needs to engage with that community on a professional level, rather than scratch around on the edges, or out and out refusing to come to the party.

I got to chat with a lot of people from proprietary software companies, and from the Ordnance Survey, all of whom were actually really interested in engaging with open source, and open access to data.  Again, more on the specifics later. It was suggested at one point that the concepts of open standards and open source are totally separate, and therefore to make the open source case better it is important not to mix the two, and I have been thinking about this ever since. From the perspective of Oxford Archaeology’s desire to adopt an “open ethos”, the two concepts are inextricably linked, but I do see that in some cases this might not be true. The standards people might not always want to be linked with open source because they need to engage with the proprietary people too. Something to think about as we continue to promote open source GIS within the UK.

On that note, I spoke to a few people about the idea of setting up a special interest group (SIG) for open source software within the AGI, and about arranging an OSGeo/AGI SIG conference within the UK next year some time. Both these points will need some expansion so I’ll leave it at that for now…