[Board] A Week in California - 2011

[Brian Hamlin]

Hi Board List-

   Best for the New Year

   I have two things of note to report.  One is that I discussed with 
Paul Ramsey and then the Marketing meeting an initiative to start a 
resource drive "to support the completion of PostGIS 2.0 before 
FOSS4G."   The second is new contact at the Board level with 
Wikipedia's Wikimedia Foundation.

PostGIS 2.0 Drive
   There was a large ~90 person Geo Developers Meetup in San Francisco, 
in cooperation with the San Francisco PostgreSQL Users Group, last 
Tuesday night.  Although I made good plans, and attendance was good, I 
was not effective at motivating this audience on this occassion. 
Perhaps not surprising, but thats the way that went. Maybe more to 
come, we shall see.

Wikimedia
   Many of you may have heard that the 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia is 
today, 15 Jan 2011. There were gatherings and celebrations in dozens of 
cities around the world, but here in San Francisco, the Wikimedia 
Foundation has an office, and there was a substantial series of events.

   I spoke with Danese Cooper,  Wikimedia CTO, about how to contact 
their "toolserver geohack" project -  a collection of pages you can 
access from any Wikipedia coordinates link. Danese told me that the 
work originates in the Netherlands and in Germany, that CloudMade had 
some relationship with the effort, but that is no longer active, and 
that Wikimedia Foundation is interested in understanding what is 
involved in a tiled map server of some kind, presumably with at least 
an OpenLayers base.

   I also spoke with Steven Walling, a personable new Wikimedia 
Foundation Community Fellow. Steven said that there is a community 
person and dev in Washington DC named Katie Wallburg (sp?) that he 
would like to put in touch...

  As you well know Wikipedia is hugely popular (for good reason). It 
receives over 350 million unique visitors per month, and recently had 
16 million articles in over 260 languages.  As an example of the 
diversity and depth of the Wikipedia users, I can tell you that at the 
20 person roundtable I hosted today at the West Coast Wiki Conference, 
we had a US Civil War historian, a Russian from an area of the world 
that was hard hit in WW II and lacks a lot of historical buildings, a 
French wikipedian involved in a map improvement to Wikipedia pages, 
several software developers and several people interested in 
place-related data accessible via mobile devices.

   So I pass this contact information over to the Board, to do whatever 
might be appropriate with..
   best regards from California
     -Brian


==
Brian Hamlin
planetwork.net
OSGeo California Chapter
(415) 717-4462 cell