[Board] Re: Clarifications regarding Romanian local chapter

Wed Jan 19 09:37:07 PST 2011

Hi Vasile,
Thanks for following up - the board is meeting tomorrow and I'll make sure  this topic is discussed again.  It's obvious you are very active - great to see and very encouraging!  I don't think anyone doubts that, but was just a little confused by the website.  It's not always easy to know where a chapter is headed, but you've helped make it very clear.

I'll talk with the board about it tomorrow and others on the list might share their thoughts too.

Best wishes,
Tyler

On 2011-01-19, at 6:54 AM, Vasile Craciunescu wrote:

> Dear board members,
> 
> Couple months ago, the Romanian "in formation" local chapter, forward to the board members an official expression of interest to be to be recognized as a full OSGeo local chapter (<http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2010-December/003710.html>). From the last board meeting minute (<http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2010-12-16.log>) we saw that some members raise concerns regarding the mix of proprietary software related materials along with the FOSS4G ones on geo-spatial.org. I'd like to take a little bit of your time to better clarify the Romanian "in formation" local chapter activity. As the original request letter mention the Romanian chapter formed around geo-spatial.org, a geospatial community website. geo-spatial.org was started in early 2006 aiming to "explore concepts, techniques and tools specific geospatial community. Promote adoption of free and open source software solutions, without ignoring the proprietary ones. It campaigns for the democratization of access to geographical data and proposed map as a universal tool of communication..." (<http://earth.unibuc.ro/info>). Why considering the proprietary side? Easy, at that time, in Romania, we had practically no FOSS4G community. Even worse, the geospatial knowledge was restricted to a very limited group of people. The universities had no coherent (and practical) curricula and courses for teaching students GIS, few books (2-3) in Romanian language were focused on GIS topic (only principles, nothing applied), GIS courses were available only at some proprietary software vendors, at prohibitive prices. The website emerged as a collaborative platform to freely share geospatial knowledge and data. At this point, a topic statistic of the published materials looks like this:
> 
> FOSS4G and open geodata: 111
> Proprietary software: 27
> Neutral (e.g. book reviews, algorithms, coordinate transformations, open letters): 106
> 
> Our policy is not to stop an author who want to publish an tutorial on how to do something with proprietary software but to try to encourage him to write how the same thing can be achieved with FOSS software. Perhaps a third of the tutorials illustrated with proprietary software also present an FOSS4G way. For the future we don't intend to change this policy. Some geospatial knowledge is better than no knowledge in a country with yet so little affordable geospatial resources.
> 
> Practical workshops are another way of promoting FOSS4G software and principles here in Romania. geo-spatial.org community organized so far a number of such events in different location across the country. In the last three years we manage to accommodate hundred of participants in such events. I'll not get into more details as this actions were described in detail in the the official expression of interest and the annual reports. I just want to mention the last event (not covered by the letter) which was held in Timișoara (19-20 November 2010) with more than 100 participants. The detailed program is published at <http://earth.unibuc.ro/osgeo/timisoara2010>. Conclusions, photos, videos, presentations and support materials for workshops are available at <http://earth.unibuc.ro/osgeo/concluzii-timisoara2011>. It is true, at this event, in the plenary session, we host a presentation given by an Esri guy. From our point of view, this was more like an challenge from Esri Romania to see if we allow them to present something at our FOSS4G event and also a confirmation that the Romanian FOSS4G community started to represent something. Was the same kind of presentation that we witnessed at the FOSS4G conference. We never did an workshop with proprietary software and do not intend to do so in the future. The next FOSS4G workshop is planned for April 2011 in Cluj Napoca.
> 
> Another project, started by geo-spatial.org, which follow the OSGeo principles is called eHarta (<http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta>). Basically we try to freely publish thousands of old maps and atlases with the help of the community. For this, we created a series of online tools for the community to enter metadata for the maps (<http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta-work-planurile-de-tragere>) and place georeference control points (<http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/eHarta-work-planurile-de-tragere-gcp>). We now have now 189 active users and the first batch of 1780 maps were documented and geooreferenced in less than one week of collaborative work.
> 
> Beside the activities carried in the name of geo-spatial.org and the local chapter, the people behind this also get involved in FOSS4G promotion (personally or representing their institutions). I would like to mention some of this actions, as they have an important role in FOSS4G adoption here in Romania.
> 
> 1. In December 2006, people from the Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) manage to get resources to support Jo Walsh visit in Romanian to give an FOSS4G and OSGeo presentation at the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference.
> 
> 2. December 2007, at the same conference, we manage to organize an open source geospatial software workshop. Detailed presentations and step by step demonstrations were made for: QGIS, uDig, PostGIS, Geoserver, MapWindow, OpenLayers and VTP. FOSS4G presentations were given also at 2008 and 2009 similar events.
> 
> 3. Local chapter activity and FOSS4G case studies were presented in several other national and international events by the community members, with financial support from their employers (e.g. all FOSS4G's 2006-2010; eLiberatica 2008 - Bucharest (<http://eliberatica.ro>), international GIS Conference 2007 - Chișinău, CASCADOSS Workshop 2008 - Warsaw (<http://cascadoss.eu>), INSPIRE Conference 2010 - Krakow (<http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/events/conferences/inspire_2010/krakow.cfm>), EGU General Assembly 2009 and 2010 - Vienna (<http://www.egu.eu/>), ISRSE 2009 - Stresa (<http://isrse-33.jrc.ec.europa.eu/>)).
> 
> 4. Our colleagues from the Bucharest University - Faculty of Geography are maintaining a LIVE-DVD with FOSS4G software and Romanian datasets (<http://freegis.ro/>)
> 
> 5. Through the same university we provide hosting support for the Romanian GRASS mirror (http://grass.unibuc.ro).
> 
> 6. Through ROSA, in 2008 we manage to support Ben Discoe (VTP project) to give a one week workshop in Bucharest on 3D visualization using VTP software.
> 
> 7. Several people from our chapter are involved in the development of some interesting open source projects (e.g. LeoWorks for European Space Agency <http://leoworks.asrc.ro/>).
> 
> 8. As a technical manager I was able to change an important LIFE project (1.2 millions Euro) from an proprietary based architecture to an open source one, saving an important amount of money which was transferred to sensors and equipments, proving that standard compliant free and open source software can be successfully used in building such complex system. More details regarding the open source part of the project are available on this osor.eu study <http://www.osor.eu/studies/airaware-managing-the-skies-of-bucharest-using-free-software>. 
> 
> 9. Final, maybe the most important achievement for the future generation of geospatial users in Romania, a team with people behind the Romanian local chapter proposed and won a three year grant of approximatively three million Euros to train 700 geography teachers in how to use open source GIS and remote sensing tools when teaching in class (<http://geospace.geografie.ubbcluj.ro/>).
> 
> I will conclude here this already long email. We are not sure if our activity is enough to become an official local chapter. However, a lot of effort and community enthusiasm was invested in all the presented actions. We now have the critical mass of FOSS4G users and new people are joining in each month. For us this is the most important thing.
> 
> If more clarifications are needed please don't hesitate in contact us through the board or local chapter mailing list.
> 
> Regards,
> Vasile (in the name of the Romanian "in formation" local chapter)
> 
> 
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Vasile Crăciunescu
> geo-spatial.org: An elegant place for sharing geoKnowledge & geoData
> http://www.geo-spatial.org
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/geo-spatial