September is clearly conference month in the geo world. FOSS4G in Denver, which I didn’t go to, was closely followed by the AGI GeoCommunity in Nottingham, which I did. I participated FOSS4G vicariously, following twitter and starring lots of posts in my google feed, and it’s only now that I’m having chance to catch up on them all and assimilate them. Seems like there was a lot of soul-searching going on, about the future of the organisation, the conference, and the geospatial industry in general. Seems also like there was a really good vibe to the event, perhaps related to a really good choice of venue, which kept people together for socialising, networking and whatever. Perhaps these two factors are related? Get a bunch of conference-goers together over some geo-beers, and no doubt a lot of discussion will take place.

One of the key questions that seems to have come up as a result of the success of this year’s event has been whether or not there should be an annual North American event alongside the global event. Personally, not being in North America, I can only see this from the international perspective, and to me it looks bad. Diluting the FOSS4G brand has to be a bad thing. How many of the big players will choose to come to the international event when they “know” everyone “important” is going to be at the North American event? However, from the perspective of raising cash for the foundation, perhaps it’s a good idea because it’s probably more commercially viable. I don’t know, but I kind of wish the idea hadn’t been brought up…

With my new directors hat on, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more discussion about this, alongside the organisational changes necessitated by dissolving the Executive Director’s post. I’m not going to go into that at all, but I would just like to say that I think Tyler did a fantastic job for OSGeo, particularly on the international scene- here in the UK he “was” OSGeo and things won’t be the same without him.

Over to the AGI GeoCommunity event. Having been on the working group helping to organise the event this year, again I had a different perspective on things to normal. Being on the working group is quite easy in the run up to the event as the AGI team do most (nearly all) of the hard work. However, you’re expected to help with exciting things like bag packing, chairing streams, and generally being around and visible throughout the two days. No sleeping during not so interesting talks! Attendance was good in the end, after a rush of late registrations, the new venue (the East Midland Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham) was a big success, and in the end even the last minute substitution of two plenary speakers (for perfectly good reasons) didn’t upset things!

I chaired the session on Open Source and Open Data on day one, which included some really worthwhile papers. Standing out (a couple of weeks after the event) are Antony Tuffour’s paper on Open Source Software Stack and Standards- Integration and GI for Everyone- about introducing a FOSS web mapping system at the London Borough of Hackney, and Mark Iliffe’s talk on When Gov 2.0 doesn’t exist- Mapping Services in the Developing World. I’ve seen Mark’s talk a couple of times now and it’s always inspirational. All the papers are available on the AGI website, so go take a look.  The famous soapbox event in the evening was won by my new(ish) boss. His talk was in reaction to the great FUD debate from a few weeks ago, excellently shown up for the absurdity that it is at the time by Paul Ramsey, and again here. Catch the YouTube video while you can!

Other things of note include the relaunch of the Technical Special Interest Group again. It’s easy to be cynical about this, as even I have now been around the AGI long enough to have seen the previous attempt lose momentum and stall, but enthusiasm is everything, and there is a lot of interest in the group as a relatively neutral umbrella under which both proprietary and open source vendors can talk techy without the sales pitch. Look out for events towards the end of the year.

There was plenty of soul-searching at the AGI GeoComm as well as at FOSS4G. While the two organisations are quite different, the same basic questions come up around providing best value, what the organisation is actually for, and how best to retain sponsorship and income in difficult financial times. Let’s just hope everyone pulls through in the end…

Slightly delayed round-up on the last day of FOSS4G (I was on holiday!), and some thoughts on the conference as a whole…

In the morning I attended a tutorial on GeoNode, which I’m very excited about. It’s a new project from the OpenGeo team that links together Geoserver, GeoNetwork, and Django. The aim is to make it easier for people to work with geospatial data and metadata, providing a content-management-system AND social network approach. This might sound weird, but I can think of lots of ways in which it might make the use and discovery of geospatial data more easy and interesting. We’ll see!

There was a lot of interest in the “alternatives to PostGIS” stream of talks, especially around CouchDB and SpatiaLite. Perhaps at some point we’ll need to have a database shoot-out to go with the WMS server one! When we have more packages supporting SpatiaLite and RasterLite, I foresee a great future for them- even if it’s just as a data transfer format, or for facilitating the storage of spatial data in a CMS.

Then we were on to OpenLayers-related talks- I particularly enjoyed Andreas Hocevar’s talk on performance configurations- and talking to other people who saw it there were some light-bulb moments!

Then on to the final Keynotes from Raj Singh and Tyler Mitchell, and notices- congratulations to Helena Mitasova for winning this year’s Sol Katz award!

So, on to final thoughts. It’s interesting to come back to FOSS4G after a 2 year gap while it’s been in unaffordable (for me) parts of the world, but also because the world is a very different place financially to how it was in 2007. In between 2007 and now, my conferences have been limited to mainstream UK GIS such as the AGI, and to OSGIS. I was surprised at how much self-confidence and excitement there was this year- in contrast to the slight introspection that I often see at the AGI (no one was worrying about whether they were Neo or Palaeo in any of the talks I went to). There was as much professionalism, research, development, and business strategy as at any other conference, but with the added excitement that came from people simply doing things they really enjoy. Many thanks to the conference organisers, and here’s to Denver next year!

Being unable to attend FOSS4G this year, I freed up lots of space in my schedule to read the daily reports that would surely come streaming from my RSS reader. I’m still waiting. In previous years, there were a lot of posts about the conference, often posted during the conference itself. What was different about this year?

OK, so we know that Paul Ramsey was awarded the Sol Katz award (though why he should be surprised by that, I don’t know), and that Chris Schmidt posted a video of Schulyer’s lightning talk (actually Chris did put a few posts up), but other than that there has been very little posting. Not fair guys! Those of us that couldn’t go want to know what the big stories were! What were the trends? What was it like playing with the proprietary guys?

Danny DeVries has a great post about the tribes of FOSS4G. So great in fact, that I shamelessly copied his title. His post looks at FOSS4G from the point of view of an interested outsider, and this helps him give a “1000ft” perspective on the interactions between the various “tribes” that are difficult to see at ground level (when you’re heavily involved in doing your particular thing). His closing paragraph is worth reading all by itself as a “why” for open source software and interoperability. Nice one!

So- the last day of FOSS4G for 2007- roll on 2008 in Cape Town (must start saving). Definitely a resounding success!

For me today, the theme was GeoFOSS as a) a business and b) as a community. For the first case, there were several presentations by geospatial consultancies on doing GeoFOSS as a business- what makes for best practices and so on. This seems to suggest a certain maturity in the discipline-an idea that was picked up by Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine in her review of the conference at the close. This was followed with talks by Chris Schmidt of OpenLayers fame and Howard Butler, and also by Tyler Mitchell that focussed on aspects of the open source community.

In reverse- Tyler gave a really good presentation on the work of OSGEO. In particular I was interested in some of his facts and figures: Since it’s inception in 2006 it has grown from 9 projects to 13- these represent 4.6 Million lines of code commited by 182 developers, equating to 1253 person-years of work. OHLOH.net estimates the worth of this code at 69 Million US Dollars. That’s big money! The main point that he made, however, is that OSGEO’s mandate is to support and develop these projects, raise awareness of them, provide infrastructure support- but most of all to reach more users. A worthy cause.

Back to Chris and Howard’s talk. If I felt uncomfortable with anything I heard this year it would be this talk, I’m afraid! Last year I struggled with some of the overt Open Source “nazism” which dictated that if you weren’t a dyed in the wool open source user who shunned all forms of proprietary software then you weren’t worth listening to. If those guys were around this year, I missed them, and I’m glad – this year was a lot more laid back. But, I digress. Chris and Howard did make some very good points around where to get support, and the steps you need to go through to make it easy for people to help you. Basically be concise, polite and gracious. Absolutely. BUT… I do have a few problems with the idea that, as a new user you are committing some kind of offence and will get a permanent black mark against your name if you don’t phrase your question exactly right or somehow know how best to approach people. The point about being new is that you are new, for chrissakes! You don’t know all of this, and to be shunned because you make a simple error first time around isn’t going to help. I understand that developers must get sick of answering stupid questions, and are doing this for the love of it, not the money, in their spare time, and so on, and I admire them immensely for their skill, dedication and enthusiasm but they do need to remember what it’s like to be new to something- even they were beginners once. If people continue to be annoying or lazy then fair enough, but give them chance or you’ll scare them off and the long term effect of that is that people stop using your product. What’s the point of all of your hard work then?

OK- rant over. Highlight of the closing session was the Sol Katz award which went to Steve Lime, father of Mapserver. A brilliant choice- as Mapserver is probably the way most people got into GeoFOSS in the first place. I’ve already talked a little about Adena’s closing review- in which she talked about the growing maturity of the community. I certainly felt that way here, but I’m about to go back to the UK where it doesn’t really feel like that. As an example- I have just been catching up with my RSS feeds, sadly neglected over the last few days and I came across a short review by Ed Parsons of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI)’s 2007 conference in London (caution- this link doesn’t look very permanent to me). They claim to represent the geospatial industry in the UK, and their conference is described as “the UK’s largest dedicated event for the geographic information community” yet in Ed’s review and the information on the conference, the only mention of anything remotely open was Nick Black doing a presentation on OpenStreetMap (he gets around!). Ed even went so far to say that many people hadn’t come across it before, which seems odd given how much press there has been about it. To be fair, there appear to have been a number of neogeography presentations, and I haven’t had a proper look at the programme so I might be wrong but if the number one industry event in the UK doesn’t talk about GeoFOSS then we’ve a long way to go. I’ve had a degree of interest at the conference about working towards a UK chapter, and I managed to hook up with about half of the delegates who come from the UK, so it’s important that we maintain the momentum. Sign up on the wiki if you’re interested, but I’ll keep on posting about developments so don’t touch that dial… (sorry, wrong analogy).

So- many many thanks for a great conference- especially to Paul Ramsey who did a great job as chair and host- Victoria is a wonderful city that everyone should visit, and I’ll forgive him for the woeful lack of seals and otters as long as we see a whole pod of whales tomorrow when we go whale-watching…

See everyone (in a virtual sense) back in the UK on Monday!

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night from Victoria. End of Day Two of FOSS4G, and the now infamous Reception and Dinner. But, in order, for me today was mainly a database and web app day. This morning there were some incredibly useful talks comparing MapServer and GeoServer, then MySQL and PostgreSQL for a range of different situations and loads. Time for much reconfiguring of servers when I get back methinks!

Another session that I saw was on Sextante, which is a spatial analysis extension to gvSIG, a really promising Spanish desktop GIS. If it wasn’t for the fact that it’s only available in Spanish I would be recommending it wholeheartedly, but for those of us who are somewhat linguistically challenged we’ll have to wait until the English version comes out later in the year. It does look great though- and quite easy to add in things like new algorithms and models without having to totally rewrite the extension.

This afternoon I saw a couple of sessions on web apps- one on 3D GIS for the web- really interesting, but as always it comes down to the availability of browser plugins. If someone could explain to me how it makes commercial sense to create a non-free browser plugin I’d be very grateful.

I’m afraid I got a bit of conference fatigue after that, so the next thing that got my attention was the festivities in the evening. The IMAX presentation of Titanica was frankly bizarre- but that was the film rather than the setting. The meal was set in the Royal BC Museum, amongst the displays, which was very cool and very strange. Most enjoyable. Again it was another opportunity to put faces to names- and to meet some interesting new people.  I seem to have promised to attempt an all-nighter tomorrow, as some kind of way of fending off jetlag on the return journey, so I’d better get some sleep…

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk at FOSS4G and/or came up and offered me kind words of encouragement afterwards. I’m pretty overwhelmed in the level of interest in this. I’ve now done something I should have done before my talk, which is create a dedicated page on this site to do with it. At the moment it’s just a description of the project and what software is included- but hopefully soon it will include a link to a version you can download. You can also express your interest in the project there, and I’ll update it when new stuff happens…

Thanks again for everyone’s support!

Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like last year, Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak. 7-dimensional hyperspheres anyone? Of course Autodesk made their big announcement about the acquisition of Mentor and the planned open sourcing of their projection and transformation tools. I wish that meant more to me, but I don’t know much about it…

Paul Ramsey’s Survey of Open Source GIS was another look at the growing trends and developments in the discipline- I look forward to comparing it to last year’s for an overview of what has been going on. Sometimes at the coal face it’s difficult to see the wider picture after all. Following on the subject of trends was Brady Forrest from O’ Reilly Media, who was looking more specifically at trends in neogeography and the geoweb rather than all facets of geospatial software. Then it was my talk on Portable GIS, which I raced through like a train and kind of forgot to mention thatI haven’t actually got t hosted anywhere yet because the package is so big. That seemed to be reasonably well received- I got nice comments and questions anyhow, which is good enough for me, and now school’s out and I can enjoy the rest of the conference.

This afternoon I saw the sessions on Quantum GIS, OpenStreetmap and GDAL/OGR. Bizarrely, I found out that Nick Black, presenting on OpenStreetMap, worked for Oxford Archaeology North recently as a surveyor. It’s a weird thing in our office that people can work for us out on sites in other parts of the UK, and never visit the main offices! Concentrating on his talk though- I had seen Steve Coast talking about OpenStreetMap in the past and have always been a little ambivalent about their claims of greatness- but clearly it is taking off and gaining a lot more legitimacy. I still don’t get how this data can be reliable though. Not in the sense of whether there are mistakes- but how do you know how complete it is? The answer that Nick came back with was that you don’t know the Ordnance Survey dataset is complete, you just hope it is. But the thing I have a problem with is that the Ordnance Survey do at least have standardised survey practices and bench marks for reliability that should lead to relatively consistent data sets. When you are relying on a group of loosely organised individuals, how do you know that people have walked down every alley, tagged every road as a road and not a street or highway or track or path or motorway? If OpenStreetMap could explain that to me then I would be a big supporter of it. I am already keen on using the data in ArcMap with the new plugin, but I need some measure of reliability.

All of this afternoon’s talks were, on one level, to do with community participation- which seems to be the big theme this year. On a purely personal level, I certainly feel more part of the community as I’ve spent a year actually doing things and talking to people. I got to put faces to quite a few names today, which is always nice- though often the faces are nothing like I expect!

Finally I went on a long walk this evening around the Beacon Hill Park, Ogden Point and Fisherman’s Wharf- what a fantastic place! Photos follow shortly on Flickr, although again I must complain about the woeful lack of Otters and Seals…

Oh- if you want a copy of my talk (but not the actual portable GIS yet) then you can find it here

Greetings from Victoria, on the day before the official commencement of FOSS4G 2007. I’ve actually been in Victoria since Friday, but William Gibson was right when he said that jetlag is like waiting for your soul to catch up with the rest of your body, as that’s exactly what I’ve felt like.

So- in brief- the flight from the UK was superb- the weather was clear over Iceland and Greenland so I had fantastic views of both. That was stunning, and even if the rest of the trip was rubbish I would still be happy just with that view. Saturday and Sunday in Victoria were cool, I did the touristy things (Museums, Chinatown, the Harbour), which were all great, and can honestly say I’ve not met such friendly and helpful people anywhere, ever. On our host’s recommendation I visited Ogden Point on Sunday- the view was fantastic but I’m sorely disappointed in the lack of otters or seals frolicking in the inner breakwater as promised. You could tell the other delegates who’d caught up on their blogs by their bags though!

Today was workshop day- and both this morning’s and this afternoon’s sessions were really worthwhile. Paul Ramsey did an Intro to Postgis, which was exactly what I needed (though what I learnt means I need to go back and completely redo our databases…), and this afternoon was a run through on how to connect GRASS to a whole bunch of RDMS, which was also really interesting.

The first OSGEO AGM happened today- which was a chance for a run-down on what has been happening with the organisation over the year. Thinking back to Lausanne last year it’s incredible how far things have come since then. Everything seems so much more mature, organised, and stable. I presented a short breakdown of OSGEO-related UK activities, which doesn’t really amount to much at present in comparison to other countries, but ended with a call to arms for people to get involved, and I extend that to any blog readers.

All in all, this looks like shaping up to be a great conference in a great city!

Whew, it’s been a busy and eventful week or so. More detailed posts to follow, but here’s a brief roundup of all that’s new in the world of Archaeogeek.

• Finally got Mapguide Open Source compiled and working on Ubuntu
• My presentation on Portable GIS has been accepted for FOSS4G 2007
• My southern counterpart is off to do his PhD

On that last point, we will be advertising soon to fill Leif’s post (more about it on his blog) and are always on the lookout for archaeological computing types at both offices, so if you’re interested then get in touch and let’s talk!