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<footer class="signatureContainer"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Board Members, Committee Chairs, stakeholders --<br />
<br />
While attending a large conference on the Scala programming language here in San Francisco,<br />
I "discovered" the following organization of institutions: The ESIP Federation:<br />
<br />
"The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is an open, networked community that brings together science, data and information technology practitioners. Participation in ESIP is beneficial because it provides an intellectual commons to expose, gather and enhance in-house capabilities in support of an organization's own mandate."<br />
<br />
Perhaps this group-of-groups, with a declared emphasis on individual practitioners,<br />
might be a source of contacts and partnerships in the United States and elsewhere, for<br />
FOSS in general and for OSGeo dot org in particular, via OSGeo-Live. <br />
<br />
--<br />
I found ESIP via this event link from a few months ago:<br />
<br />
http://westbigdatahub.org/datahackworkshop/<br />
<br />
that is a "data hackathon" that has institutional backers, but is an <br />
event for individuals. I did not attend this event, but generally, people sign up,<br />
use facilities provided by the sponsor committee, and form small ad-hoc teams<br />
for the purpose of a contest of some kind.. <br />
<br />
OSGeo has sponsored code sprints focused on OSGeo projects.. Yet the structure <br />
is somewhat similar to a "hackathon", no ? Individuals with various organizational <br />
and professional affiliations come together, at a time and place with sponsorship, <br />
and act in ad-hoc teams for the purpose of building features, implementing bug-fixes <br />
and other difficult and necessary work, for a short time. Emphasis is not on the <br />
organizational affiliation ** during the event **.<br />
<br />
It may be possible to add resources like the OSGeo-Live VM, to events like that<br />
in the future. It is certainly true that that the very capable toolchains within the<br />
OSGeo-Live, are directly applicable to ESIP publicly-stated goals.<br />
<br />
Lastly:<br />
Christine White, Federation Vice-President, says in here nomination statement:<br />
<br />
"ESIP makes data matter by making people matter."<br />
<br />
A familiar name in the Information Technology & Interoperability Committee Chair seat:<br />
<br />
Rich Signell, USGS, Woods Hole Coastal & Marine Science Center<br />
<br />
Rich's stated goals:<br />
"Facilitating the development of community models and interoperable tools and techniques <br />
for finding, accessing and analyzing ocean model data. "<br />
<br />
A somewhat-dated document on the Federaton Strategic Plan is listed:<br />
<br />
http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/2009-2013_Strategic_Plan<br />
<br />
The Federation member list:<br />
<br />
http://www.esipfed.org/esip-member-list<br />
<br />
best regards from Berkeley, California<br />
--Brian M Hamlin</span></footer>
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