Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I am proud to finally announce the inaugural meetup of the nascent UK local chapter of OSGEO on Thursday 1st May, from 4.30 to 7pm (or later if we can find a suitable hostelry) at the Radisson SAS Hotel, Stansted Airport, just outside London. For those that don’t know- OSGEO is a global organisation founded to encourage and support development in open source GIS.
We have been trying to get together some interest in a UK local chapter for some time now, so I am really pleased to announce this event. The agenda is still open to negotiation, so if you would like to come along and talk about something, or demo something, then you’re more than welcome. The only fixed point is that we would like to come up with a roadmap for moving the UK chapter forward, and hopefully provide a forum in which like-minded people (eg you) can discuss FOSS GIS and the issues around it. Furthermore, Tyler Mitchell will be giving a short talk on OSGEO globally, and will also be available for personal discussions with people or companies interested in OSGEO.
There is a wiki page about the event here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_UK_Meetup_May_2008, please sign up if you’re interested so we can get some idea of numbers, and please feel free to pass on this information to anyone else you know who might be interested. There are links on that page to maps and hotel options if you need them.
I very much look forward to hopefully meeting some or all of you in May!

Be there or be badly encoded kml… (or something)

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!

There have been a few heads-up over the last week about 52°North, who have just announced an initiative for geospatial open source software. Of course, we’ve heard this before, but this time ESRI are on board.

So, we have Autodesk supporting OSGEO, and ESRI supporting 52North’s initiative (it needs a snappy title or acronym). The approach seems different though, because Autodesk chipped in right from the word go by open-sourcing one fork of MapGuide, which they freely admitted was not a core product. It appears however as if ESRI are not looking to open-source one of their existing products, but to help to develop new technologies, currently in the areas of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Security and Digital Rights Management (to quote from the press release).

Personally, I can’t decide if the big guys are squaring up for an opensource fight, or if we’re just seeing much more involvement in the opensource movement. Following on from the recent discussion about the use of opensource alternatives to ESRI’s main product lines, and further back, ESRI’s decision to include support for PostgreSQL as a database, hopefully this is all a sign of a gathering momentum. At first I thought this 52 North initiative was a bad thing- a dilution of focus, but maybe it’s just a sign that the snowball’s getting that bit bigger. More products, and some healthy competition has to be good, right?

At FOSS4G last week, my colleagues and I got chatting with the folks from OSGEO. It was difficult not to, given that they played such a huge part in organising the conference. Anyhow, we identified that it would be a good idea to set up a UK Local Chapter, to provide a UK-specific focus and slant on the work that OSGEO are doing. The kind of things we might look at include providing a first port-of-call to newcomers to the world of geomatics in the UK, with a particular focus on the open source tools available; providing a focus for lobbying for public access to Geodata (you know, the stuff we’ve paid for with our Taxes but have to pay again to use).

What we need at the moment is expressions of interest. Enough signatures will convince the board that such a chapter would be worth setting up. We only have a few names at the moment, mainly because we only started canvassing this week, so if you feel you could sign up then pop on over to the wiki and add your name. For more information on local chapters, here’s the place to look.

What we are also trying to do is come up with a manifesto for the group. If you have something to contribute to this, then please feel free! That’s what wikis are for, after all…

If you’re into archaeology, regardless of whether or not you’re in the UK, but you are interested in Open Source applications or Open Standards in archaeology, then we’re also investigating the level of interest in an Archaeology Special Interest Group. Again, at the moment we just need expressions of interest and ideas.