From neteler at itc.it Mon Mar 6 10:24:36 2006 From: neteler at itc.it (Markus Neteler) Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 19:24:36 +0100 Subject: Open Source Geospatial Foundation Created to Strengthen Collaborative Development of Open Geospatial Technologies Message-ID: <440C7E64.30405@itc.it> *Press release* Open Source Geospatial Foundation Created to Strengthen Collaborative Development of Open Geospatial Technologies *OSGEO to provide an umbrella for community-led GIS and mapping projects* March 06, 2006 - The open source geospatial community today announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation , a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It will also serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. On February 4th, OSGEO held its first meeting in Chicago with 25 participants representing 18 groups and over 20 different open source geospatial projects, and 39 other parties participating via Internet Relay Chat. At this meeting, the participants took important steps in forming and organizing a foundation to develop and support open source geospatial technologies, including defining the foundation's name, structure and vision. The consensus reached at the Chicago meeting paves the way to establish a productive, inclusive foundation. The Chicago meeting also resulted in the appointment of an initial board of directors that will be responsible for the drafting and execution of the foundation's charter and bylaws. The initial five directors come from North America and Europe and represent various open source projects and technologies. The initial five directors of OSGEO are: * Arnulf Christl - Mapbender , CCGIS, Germany; * Chris Holmes - GeoServer /GeoTools , The Open Planning Project, U.S.; * Gary Lang - MapGuide , Autodesk, U.S.; * Markus Neteler - GRASS , Istituto Trentino Di Cultura, Italy; * Frank Warmerdam - GDAL/OGR , Canada. The foundation expects to appoint four additional directors within the next several weeks to serve as the full interim board until the next annual meeting of the foundation membership at FOSS4G this fall. OSGEO draws governance inspiration from several aspects of the Apache Foundation , including a membership composed of individuals drawn from foundation projects who are selected for membership status based on their active contribution to foundation projects and governance. The initial membership consists of the five initial board members plus 16 other participants who attended the Chicago organizational meeting. The foundation added recently further 24 members from the broader open source geospatial community through a public nomination and election process to reach 45 voting members. Initial OSGEO projects are GeoTools , Mapbender , MapBuilder , MapGuide , MapServer , GDAL/OGR , GRASS , and OSSIM . The foundation will not require that OSGEO software projects to be licensed under any one particular open source license, but will require that all OSGEO software be released under an open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) . The long term goal is to encourage licenses that allow the different foundation projects to work better together and permit for code exchange among them. The foundation will implement contribution and intellectual property policies designed to avoid the inclusion of proprietary or patented code in OSGEO projects. Foundation projects are focused on interoperability - both with one another at the library level, and with other proprietary and open source projects through the use of open standards. The foundation will also be pursuing goals beyond software development, such as promoting more open access to government produced spatial data, which is a major problem outside of North America. *About the Open Source Geospatial Foundation* The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It will also serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. For more information, write to info at osgeo.org and see http://www.osgeo.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From warmerdam at pobox.com Thu Mar 23 22:44:18 2006 From: warmerdam at pobox.com (Frank Warmerdam) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 01:44:18 -0500 Subject: OSGeo Presidents Newsletter #1 Message-ID: <44239542.8070806@pobox.com> OSGeo Supporters, We are now roughly seven weeks into the existence of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and I am quite excited by some of the progress we have made. But it has also been pointed out to me that many members of our community and supporters are not able to "see" what is going on very clearly. To try and alleviate that I have agreed to write a brief newsletter intended to summarize activities within the foundation on a regular basis, perhaps every week or two. This one may be a bit longer than most as I try to summarize much of what has been accomplished since our launch. Membership and Board -------------------- At our formation meeting in Chicago we decided that the folks attending the meeting would form the core membership of the foundation, but it was also seen as important to reach out and expand the membership beyond those who attended. To that ended we have completed a process of selecting additional members and board members. We now have 45 voting members, and a full board of nine directors. I am very pleased that we have achieved a degree of representation from around the globe, and many aspects of our community (developers, educators, commercial users, and hobbyists). We are working on a formal definition of "Associate Member" (or essentially a non-voting member) but in the meantime I consider anyone an associate of the foundation if they consider themselves that! I stress, you don't need to be a voting member to contribute in all sorts of ways to the work of the foundation. Web Site and Wiki ----------------- The Website Committee (webcommittee.osgeo.org), chaired by Daniel Brookshier is responsible for maintaining the content, style and technology for the OSGeo website and Wiki. The web site is intended to be the "official face of OSGeo" and WebCom is working to flesh it out with content. The Wiki (http://wiki.osgeo.org) is a much more free-wheeling place, and anyone is welcome to register with the wiki, and add thoughts to existing pages, or create new pages with things they think are important. Note that stuff in the wiki is *not* the official policy of the foundation. Just because you see something suggested there doesn't mean we will or won't do it. But it is an excellent environment to collaborate with others on ideas. WebCom has also launched a Logo Contest to develop a logo for the foundation. This is your opportunity to fine fame and fortune! Please consider making a submission. Details are at: https://www.osgeo.org/content/news/news_archive/logo_contest.html WebCom is also looking for a "news editor" for the web site. See the announcement about this at: https://mail.osgeo.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=334 Project Incubation ------------------ On launch there were eight projects who committed to joining the foundation as official "foundation projects". They are GDAL, GeoTools, GRASS, Mapbender, MapBuilder, MapGuide Open Source, MapServer and OSSIM. Early on the board decided that these projects should go through an "incubation" process just like future projects will. The incubation process is intended to bring projects into alignment with foundation "culture", procedures and requirements. Part of the process is some sort of intellectual property review as well. The Incubation Committee is responsible for developing policy on how incubation will work, and applying it to these projects. The committee is chaired by me (Frank Warmerdam) and includes a representative of each of the initial projects. On a technical level some projects are now already appearing on the osgeo.org website proper (ie. mapguide.osgeo.org, and gdal.osgeo.org). Details on what it means to be a foundation project are still being discussed. One controversial topic has been what approaches are appropriate to verify that all code in foundation projects has been properly (ie. legally) contributed. On the one hand we want to avoid situations where users or developers of foundation projects are exposed to legal problems due to improperly contributed code. On the other hand we don't want to place unnecessary barriers in the way of contribution. We were excited to have the Open Source luminary Eric Raymond contribute to this discussion. Public Geospatial Data Committee -------------------------------- In Chicago it was agreed that data availability is a significant barrier to wider use of open source geospatial software. To that end, we accepted it as a goal of the foundation to promote the availability of free geospatial data. To that end a committee was recently formed to pursue this objective, with Jo Walsh as the chair. See geodata.osgeo.org. In cooperation with Jo the foundation also issued a statement in support of the publicgeodata.org position with regard to the European INSPIRE directive that threatened to forestall the availability of public geospatial datasets in Europe. Jo has reported that substantial progress was made in the most recent revision steps of the INSPIRE directive, and we hope that the support of OSGeo played at least some small role. At the first formal meeting of the committee it was decided to form three working groups. One focused on Discovery (providing a catalog of public data sources), one focused on Packaging (repackaging data for use, documentation, meta-data), and one focused on Licensing (guidelines on data licensing). Promotion and Visibility ------------------------ Promotion of open source geospatial software is a core mission of the foundation. Promotion of the foundation itself is a necessary to collect greater support and influence for the foundation. The Promotion and Visibility committee, chaired by Arnulf Christl, is responsible for promoting the foundation, foundation projects and open source geospatial software in general to the broader geospatial industry. This committee will be working to prepare promotional and presentation materials suitable for use at conferences and trade shows. It will also be coordinating an OSGeo presence at appropriate industry events. It is planning it's first official meeting next week, and there are lots of opportunities to contribute. http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Promotion_and_Visibility_Committee Fundraising ----------- An official committee to develop a fundraising program for OSGeo has been formed, and is chaired by Frank Warmerdam. A formative meeting will be held soon (watch discuss list for announcements). Some thoughts on a sponsorship program can be found at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Fundraising The goal would be to raise funds to support the foundation itself, as well as (potentially) to support specific foundation projects. Education --------- It is expected that a committee focused on the educational community will be officially formed this week. It would be focused on developing Curriculum based on open source software, and well as better cooperation with academic research projects. More on this soon. http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project There has been a related discussion of the possibility of having an OSGeo Certification program, which might be associated with a training program. More ideas on this can be found at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Certification_Committee Binary Distributions -------------------- There has been a variety of discussions about how to support those preparing binaries distributions for different platforms (ie. Debian, Red Hat, Win32, MacOSX) and whether we should have an OSGeo branded stack of binaries. This is still in a formative stage, but more information can be found at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Distribution_Special_Interest_Groups Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org