Related link: http://omsug.ca/osgis2004/program.html
I had the privilege of being part of the Open Source GIS / MapServer User Conference last week in Ottawa (June 9-11). Many software projects end up "proving" themselves by having some sort of conference themed around them. This conference was no exception. It was a wonderfully executed and very well-organized event. Kudos to the Ottawa MapServer Users Group for their tremendous effort organizing the event!
There were at least two key aspects to this conference: community building and solution showcasing.
This was a "coming out" for the community that has developed around the technology over the past few years. More than 200 delegates met face-to-face, many for the first time. In an age where you can "know" someone without ever "meeting" them, this kind of contact will help the long-term health of the community.
This was also a public showcase and hands-on learning opportunity for numerous technologies. Many of them sit quietly behind other applications in the form of libraries, databases or web services while others take an up-front role as a graphical interface or mapping engine.
The conference audience included GIS analysts and web developers, among many others. The fact that these two realms are overlapping regularly is exciting in itself. At a domain level, I met representatives from the ocean science, ecology, natural resources, health and academic communities - to name a few - many who were coming together for the first time.
What does ocean science have to learn from epidemiology and vice-versa? Everything - if it has to do with geospatial data management and visualization. We all learned that there are common problems and (potentially) common solutions to these problems.
I personally met people from Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Canada and the U.S. We had the opportunity to listen to presentations and participate in hands-on workshops. Both helped us learn about what others are doing with the free and open source geospatial tools that are available.
Often the main benefit of open source GIS and mapping tools appears to be the low cost, especially when compared to the commercial alternatives. However, the greater strength, we are realizing is the vibrant community support and also the power of technology that is ahead of the commercial software curve in many respects. It's great stuff all around.
I'll touch more on the specific technologies in future weblog entries.
Did you take in the conference? Hear of it? Want to learn more? Leave a note.
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Conference proceedings available
Presentations, photos, etc. are now available at: http://www.omsug.ca/osgis2004/proceedings.html
2nd MapServer Conference
I also heard great things about last year's MapServer User Meeting - unfortunately I was unable to attend.
This year's event was a combined conference: Open Source GIS Conference and the 2nd MapServer User Meeting. There were two session streams throughout the event, though they were often indistinguishable because all the sessions were just so darn interesting!
In the MapServer workshops that I helped with there were plenty of people who were unfamiliar with MapServer, so it was also an excellent opportunity to cross-pollinate between MapServer projects and other Open Source GIS projects. I understand that next year's event will probably have a similar format.
Tyler
2nd MapServer Conference
It should be pointed out that this was the 2nd Annual MapServer User Meeting - the first was held last year in MapServer's geographical site of origin: Minneapolis. As the first official gathering, that first conference was enormously exciting and it is good to hear that the enthusiasm and support for MapServer has continued. This is a great example of a rather specialized open source project filling a niche and developing a supportive user base.
Information from that first user Meeting can still be found at:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/mum/index2003.html
QGIS : Another cool OSS GIS project
Thanks for checking in Tim. I'll second that: QGIS is definitely cool. I've been tracking it for a couple years and have been impressed with its capabilities, particularly those of PostGIS and other formats supported through GDAL/OGR. The developers have had their head in the right space building on existing libraries.
For those unfamiliar with GDAL/OGR, it is an robust spatial data support library. When integrated into an app it immediately supports a myriad of raster/image and vector data formats. This is excellent, allowing developers to avoid having to write custom data access drivers that others have already produced. So instantly, a new user knows QGIS has excellent vector and raster support.
QGIS is one of the nicest looking desktop GIS apps I've seen and now you've got me curious enough to try it out again.
We have started a new effort to develop a GIS suite of available OSS products that is easily installable across platforms. I'm glad to see Gary involved to get QGIS into that suite.
Tyler
GDAL - http://gdal.maptools.org
OGR - http://ogr.maptools.org/
QGIS : Another cool OSS GIS project
Hi. I am one of the developers of QGIS. QGIS was started by Gary Sherman a couple of years ago and has been moving forward in leaps and bounds lately. It is based on QT and aims for full cross platform capability. It supports Postgis and GDAL/OGR layers. If you are interested in using or contributing to a really nice 'up and coming' open source GIS package, pay us a visit at: http://qgis.org".
Regards
Tim Sutton
Enjoyable development
One thing that strikes me in Open Source / FOSS communities is the level of cooperation and the responsiveness of communities. Trying to find help on large proprietary systems, even though the large corporations that own those systems do provide technical infrastructure elements like forums and wikis for lively user communities of their product to emerge, is a heck of a lot harder than posting to a community-based and community-driven newsgroup or mailing list. Rich Green, a Sun VP, said a few months ago : "developers don't buy things, they join things ... give them a community to join".
Communities are indeed, to me, where fellow developers can work and help each other. Since developers are usually a one-person team in SME (small to medium enterprises) and at best a handful in even the largest organizations, the burden on their shoulders is so huge that the only way I find to alleviate it is to be able to count on a community of people that share my concerns. The one thing I meant to add at the closing plenary of the conference is that ultimately, and I think this should be a goal (though I don't know where the asymptote lies ...), what I *really* look forward is to find myself amongst a group of people that are not always rushed and running after time to complete their tasks, in short people that *enjoy* developing. "Enjoyable development" really is an instantiation of the concept of sustainable development, where people can achieve their professional obligations in reasonable amounts of time and stress, where they have time to play soccer with their kids, etc. That's what I'm shooting for as a developer and I find OS/FOSS communities to be the best channel towards achieving that goal. Now, how that fits in in the business world is for us to find.