Tuesday, September 25. 2007

FOSS4G Opening/Lightning Talks

The opening session of FOSS4G (OSGeo's open source for geospatial conference) being held this week in Victoria started with an interesting sight: a large well-packed room, two large video screens, and people looking for seats. Conference chair Paul Ramsey of Refractions Research noted the attendance at 670, about twice that of the last such conference I attended two years ago in Minneapolis. Last year in Lausanne, Switzerland the total was 535. Paul offered up his theme/advice for the remaining three days: make a connection to help grow the community. That's not so different than ideas suggested at other conferences, but I always find it easier to do at this event.

Autodesk as a platinum sponsor got the first slot and Geoff Zeiss offered what I consider the Autodesk party line about standards, failing infrastructure, aging workforce, convergence, dis-enfranchised field staffers (who use geodata but have no real input in its update/quality)... He also noted Autodesk's client San Fransiscos's urban forest project, a MapGuide Open Source implementation. This was the first time I "got" it was a public participation site. Somehow I think that got lost in the initial media sweep. He also noted DM Solutions' Fusion, a framework that will allow editing from the field, among other things. The announcement of the acquisition of Mentor Software and the plan to turn its coordinate transformation libraries open source as an OSGeo project was a yawn for most. I explain why it's important at Directions Magazine.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Autodesk, FOSS4G2007 at 22:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Ingress to Support OSGEO

Update: Ingress is supporting OSgeo at the Supporting Sponsor level. That is, the $10,000 level. Full info on sponsors here.

--- original post 9/24/07
I guess everyone is here in Victoria (for FOSS4G) so no one saw the release. The exact nature of the support is not detailed, but since I'm here I'll see what I can find out.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, FOSS4G2007 at 17:54 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |