Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

A couple of weeks ago was the OSGIS 2010 conference at the Centre for Geospatial Sciences at the University of Nottingham. This was expanded on the previous year’s event- it was spread over 2 days with workshops on the first day and the conference on the second. We also held the 2nd AGM of the UK OSGeo local chapter after the conference (a shameless attempt to get as many people as possible to attend).

The workshops went well- I reprised my “Databases and Web Mapping the Open Source way” workshop using the OSGeo Live DVD in the process. If you last tried Live DVDs a few years ago and think they are going to be unworkably slow and clunky then think again. The Live DVD team have done a very good job with the OSGeo version too!

As is usually the case when you’re involved in running an event, my memory of the actual papers on day two is somewhat hazy. Stand-out themes were TinyOWS and GvSIG in my book. The GvSIG team in particular were there in force, and very impressive.

The local chapter AGM went well, although I’ve committed my first mistake in calling it the local chapter, as we decided that was a bit too hells-angels, so we’re now called OSGeo:UK (branding updates to follow). Perhaps due to my (even more) shameless emotional blackmail in my introductory talk, there was a lot of new interest. We now have a mailing list of over 100 people for a start. The mailing list is actually the best place to go for my quick round-up of the AGM- check out the archive for more details. In particular though, if you are involved in promoting any workshops using open source software and you want some publicity then get in touch as we want to get a good list together of all the events that are taking place in the UK.

I followed up events in Nottingham with assisting at another two-day workshop in Leicester, at which I repeated my “databases and web mapping…” talk yet again, alongside talks on spatial statistics with R, and QGIS/GRASS. My talks for all these events are up on slideshare if you’re interested, and will follow in the downloads section of this website when time permits.

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.

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!

Time for another round-up…

• The Ordnance Survey have revised the terms and conditions of using their OpenSpaces mapping API (via Mapperz), which is a step in the right direction, since they now allow adverts on your site. There’s still a daily limit to the number of views/address lookups that you can do too. However, there are a couple of points that need mentioning/clarifying… firstly there’s a strange condition that you can’t use this for “internal business administration”. Not sure what that really means, but I assume it’s so you don’t stick it behind a firewall and stop OS counting your number of page views or something. Furthermore, there’s nothing obvious on the site about whether you need a license to use the data still, in which case it’s still a show-stopper. I’ve emailed them for clarification about that, so watch this space…
• Tyler Mitchell has an article in Direction Magazine about “Reassuring End Users of Open Source“.  I’m uneasy about the term “Reassuring”, as it has slightly negative connotations (“don’t worry!”, “worry, who said anything about worrying?”), but the article is well worth a read with some useful comments on the advantage of open source for businesses and the role of OSGeo.
• No doubt everyone already knows about the OpenGeo Architecture White Paper. Personally I think it’s another good paper to have around and quote from (or steal slides from) when trying to convince people that using open source geospatial software  is a more flexible and all round sensible approach to your geospatial stack.
• OStatic have an article about Open Source software at NASA. Not so much geospatial stuff going on there, but it’s good to see the top two reasons why NASA go for Open Source:

To increase NASA software quality via community peer review

To accelerate software development via community contributions

It’s good to see “quality” as an argument for choosing Open Source, rather than “saving money”!