<div>Hi,</div> <div>the meeting has some fruit to offer to the developing world like India.</div> <div>We require to create an atmosphere here such that GFOSS/FOSS4G/GRASS is made part of the curriculum. </div> <div>Initially it can sustain being a part of the GIS</div> <div>taught in Colleges along with the Commercial packages. </div> <div>This hopefully can break the ice, and show us the road to adaptation</div> <div>of GFOSS/FOSS4G/GRASS in the developing countries.</div> <div>Ravi</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div><BR><BR><B><I>Markus Neteler <neteler@itc.it></I></B> wrote:</div> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">Dear GRASS Community,<BR><BR>after returning from the Chicago meeting I'll summarize below some relevant<BR>points of the meeting discussions there which were supported by IRC chats.<BR>25 people attended the meeting, a peak of 50-60 people were listening/writi!
ng<BR>in
the dedicated IRC channels. Comments from IRC were picked up [1] and<BR>discussed, a couple of people also followed via telephone.<BR><BR>Here key points from the meeting:<BR>* Attendees represented over 17 different groups/companies and over 20<BR>different open source/free software geospatial projects<BR>* Foundation name: "Open Source Geospatial Foundation" or just OSGeo.<BR>Domain will be: http://osgeo.org (already registered, but not yet set up)<BR>* Initial membership started with attendees who met in Chicago<BR>* Initial/Interim board elected (from a longer list of proposals):<BR>- Arnulf Christl - Mapbender/ccgis.de, Germany<BR>- Chris Holmes - GeoServer, Open Plans, U.S.<BR>- Gary Lang - MapGuide, Autodesk, U.S.<BR>- Markus Neteler - GRASS, ITC-irst, Italy<BR>- Frank Warmerdam - GDAL, OGR, etc., Canada<BR>* Adding more members and board members will be discussed shortly<BR>after having set up the infrastructure.<BR><BR>New "OSGeo" mailing lists and Web site will be!
set up
shortly, also the<BR>minutes and results from the meeting will be posted there. This will take <BR>a couple days to get this together. We had 10 hours in the meeting room<BR>and yet very little time to actually post documents.<BR><BR>For me it was a very successful and productive meeting. While being very<BR>skeptical before, I am now confident that the "migration" from a Mapserver<BR>oriented foundation to a global "Geo" foundation happens. Looking at<BR>the interim board, we see that various different projects are represented<BR>from (currently) two continents.<BR><BR>Initially, I was skeptical as I wanted to avoid a Mapserver/Mapguide centric<BR>foundation, and only limited to software issues. The scope of the new OSGeo<BR>foundation is much wider and includes also GIS (not only mapping), promotion<BR>of Free geospatial data (for parts of the world outside North America) and<BR>education issues such as a GFOSS core curriculum. Of course these ideas are<BR>still templates!
which
have to be filled by the communities.<BR><BR>The goal is to establish the new foundation as reference point for all<BR>relevant GFOSS communities. It was discussed to make the new web server a<BR>"one stop shop" for the participating projects. This would help to avoid that<BR>people have to seek many different web sites etc. But also a sourceforge<BR>style shall be avoided.<BR>An idea is to migrate projects to the foundation to homogenize the look and<BR>feel while getting provided all necessary infrastructure (Web server, Mailing<BR>lists, bug tracker, compile farm, whatever else). Things are inspired by the<BR>successful Apache Foundation. However, the new foundation will not strictly<BR>follow their principles which would not make much sense either. For example,<BR>a transfer of the copyright does simply not work for many projects and is<BR>also not desired by everyone. But I see many benefits in migrating the<BR>project hosting to a single server (network):<BR><BR>- har!
monized
look and feel ("branding" of the GFOSS projects to appear<BR>as well established and cohesive suggestion to users and clients)<BR>- less work at our end of maintaining the infrastructure<BR>- possibility to easily redirect issues/bug reports across communities<BR>- if possible, compile farm to generate packages for various operating<BR>systems<BR>- more...<BR><BR>However, this will certainly take time and details have to be worked out.<BR><BR>For now, a couple of projects were suggested to be initial projects in<BR>the new foundation:<BR><BR>- Mapbender<BR>- MapBuilder<BR>- MapGuide<BR>- GDAL/OGR<BR>- GRASS<BR>- OSSIM<BR><BR>The Mapserver project is currently doing a poll in their community<BR>(probably to avoid the November/December problems).<BR><BR>Since copyrights are not touched, my suggestion is to get GRASS into<BR>the foundation. It plays an important role as the only complete free GIS.<BR>So it should become a visible part of the open source GIS product stack.<BR>U!
nless the
question appears to move software/communication channels to a<BR>foundation infrastructure, not much will change for now. But GRASS will<BR>be recognized as key project in this initiative. This may be a good<BR>opportunity to get out of the niche. Cohesion and transparency are<BR>also desired to avoid parallel development of identical algorithms.<BR><BR>I see a major advantage in improving the cohesion between the various<BR>GFOSS projects out there, the Saturday meeting changed my skeptical<BR>opinion into a favourable one. Since I was suggested and elected into<BR>the board, we'll have some influence to get things into the right<BR>direction.<BR><BR>There are various blogs about the new
foundation:<BR>http://mappinghacks.com/index.cgi/2006/02/04#osgeo-foundation<BR>http://www.perrygeo.net/wordpress/?p=27<BR>http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2092&trv=1<BR>http://spatialgalaxy.net/?cat=3<BR>http://geotips.blogspot.com/2006/02/open-source-geospatial-foundation.html<BR>...and more...<BR><BR>Images (for now still on the old server since the osgeo.org isn't set up yet):<BR>http://www1.mapserverfoundation.org/chicago-pics/images.html<BR><BR>Hoping for comments,<BR>best regards<BR><BR>Markus<BR><BR><BR>[1] http://logs.qgis.org/geofoundation/<BR>-> #geofoundation.2006-02-04.log<BR>-> [Community] [Funding] [Governance] [Legal]<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><p>
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