FOSSGIS

[Paul Scott]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 22:52 -0700, Chris Holmes wrote:
> 
> Cool.  Yeah, the one thing that might be nice is to have it eventually 
> have a same look and feel to OSGeo, we're doing such things in our 
> software projects, letting them run their own infrastructure, yet aim 
> towards a common look and layout, so it seems like one coherent place.
> 

I did ask our designer to try and emulate the look and feel of OSGeo,
and that skin was what she came up with in a few minutes... She will put
in some more work on it in the future, but for now it stands.

> That said, if the community wants to go it's own direction, that's great 
> too.  OSGeo will support as much or as little as you all would like.
> 

I would like to see endorsement from OSGeo for this site. My main
concerns are that the OSGeo site is very slow from even South Africa,
where our bandwidth is *relatively* good!

Another major factor is language. The SA site can cater for any number
of African languages (and others of course), and this may become more
valuable in time. People tend to learn more and collaborate more freely
in their own language, and we have a number of translation tools that
facilitate cross-language collaboration as well.

I would also like to use this site as a slightly more friendly version
of OSGeo, not so much focused on heavy projects, but also a lot of
understandable content (with pictures) that non-GIS people can have a
look at and possibly get interested in this field.

I may be going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I think it may become
quite a nice "Portal" for the OSS GIS community in Africa!

--Paul