Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I have been musing all week over my response to some questions posted originally by James Fee and answered by Paul Ramsey and Jody Garnett.

The question has become one about the value of OSGeo as a brand- well personally I think the marketing aspects are really important. I’ve stood up and talked about open source GIS an awful lot recently, to a diverse range of people, trying to persuade them that it’s a viable choice for their business. Having OSGeo as an over-reaching network is really important, because it negates the common queries about where to go for support and how to tell if a project is sustainable. It’s a way of getting people to buy into the whole open source GIS concept and community, rather than using a particular programme that just happens to be free to download.

I do think that case studies and project support are incredibly valuable too, don’t get me wrong, but if we think OSGeo has a role in gaining new users for open source GIS, particularly in the business sector, then we need the brand and marketing too.

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…

I had a lightning-fast trip to Nottingham on Tuesday to do a short talk on OSGeo and the role of Local Chapters at the Centre for Geospatial Science’s Geospatial Web Services Workshop. I wish I had been able to attend more of the workshop, as it looked pretty good, but alas I was holidaying at the time. All the presentations were recorded as webcasts and are available on the website. The Centre is looking for feedback on how well this approach works, so do check it out. Unfortunately the firefox browser isn’t supported, which is a fairly large limiting factor in my book.

Below, with luck, is an embedded version of my very short presentation (which is probably of no use whatsoever without my notes, but hey):

So, as always, if you’re interested in being part of the nascent UK Local Chapter for OSGeo then sign up for the mailing list and check out the wiki. I have some ideas for things that we might get involved in and I’ll be developing them over the next couple of weeks and I’ll post just as soon as I can make some coherent sense of them.

Time for a quick catch up…

Last Thursday was the first get-together for the UK OSGeo local chapter. Actually we’re not a formal chapter yet- we have to get approved by the board first but it’s a start! People came along from a wide variety of different GIS sub-disciplines, which was nice, although there was a comment that perhaps archaeology was over-represented! We had a selection of quick talks from Tyler Mitchell (intro to OSGeo), Suchith Anand (OGC Interoperability), me (Portable GIS) and Jason Jorgenson (FOSS for archaeological site catchment analysis), and then had a lively discussion about what we thought the local chapter should do.

Various channels were suggested for promoting the chapter and providing forums for meeting up (important for continuing the momentum), and there were many good ideas for what it should actually do. In general people felt that a local chapter could provide a “professional face” for the use of open source software, making links with the big industry players within the UK, like the AGI (Association for Geographic Information). Rather than “going up against” the proprietary companies, we should be highlighting the fact that there is a viable choice.

This is a big ask in a way. Holding informal seminars on the back of conferences is one thing, but providing a professional face means creating literature and display material and attending as many of the large industrial conferences as possible. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out as we’ll be relying on the goodwill and enthusiasm of volunteers, but we’ll see how it goes. I might sound a little down-beat about it, but I don’t mean to- it’s exciting stuff- or has the potential to be.

Our next step is to get the mailing list of the ground, to get people talking. Then we are hoping to have a presence in some fashion at the Geospatial Web Services workshop at the University of Nottingham in June. Then the AGI conference is in September, and FOSS4G is after that… the world is our oyster (or should that be fish and chips for us Brits?)