content on africa@osgeo list and Gavin intro

[Gavin Fleming]

Of course this list is open to <any> 'open GIS' topic, including dev
chatter... 

By way of introducing myself, I've been 'doing GIS' for 10 years, mainly
in the environmental field. I started off 100% 'proprietary' but over
the last few years have become an ardent user and promoter of anything
open source and anything that promotes an open philosophy. It's great to
see the interest and uptake in OS GIS locally.

I've used these to varying degrees: PostGIS, GeoServer, MapServer,
InterMap, GeoNetwork, gvSIG, uDIG, MapBuilder, GRASS, Thuban.

I haven't personally done any hacking with them, but colleagues where I
was working the last couple of years at the 'ICT for Earth Observation'
group at the Meraka Institute used, hacked and contributed back to GDAL
and OSSIM. It's really satisfying to be able to do all the work and
research you need to with 100% OS tools and know that others can benefit
from your improvements. 

I'm now working on sustainability research and Sensor Web Enablement in
the mining industry and plan to use only OS tools. Already in a big
project consortium we are using OS tools and open standards to
collaborate. One of the OS tools facilitating this is called COGIS. If
Hardy reads this far he can expand on COGIS and let you know when and
where you can get it.

Gavin

PS: a great book to read is 'The Success of Open Source' by Steven
Weber.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Scott [mailto:pscott at uwc.ac.za] 
Sent: 05 April 2006 01:16 PM
To: africa at mail.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: content on africa at osgeo list

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 13:08 +0200, Jody Garnett wrote:
> Is this limited to data sharing? I was hoping to scare up use
developer 
> chatter as well...

Me too!

I really enjoy the development side of things, and have a number of
projects that are used throughout the community. I have also set up a
site that will become increasingly useful in the future to foster more
development and FOSS GIS collaboration at http://fsiu.uwc.ac.za/gis/

I am an ardent supporter (and user) of the refractions Research
products, most notably PostGIS, of which one of my main projects is the
PostGIS PHP classes that are in quite wide use throughout the PostGIS
community.

Lets do get some dev chatter...It will also allow the non-devs to get
into what is going on in the communities so that more informed choices
and decisions can be made in their business/enterprise roles as well.

--Paul



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