[Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

[Michael P. Gerlek]

I heard this too, but never got around to writing anything down about it.  My quick thought was that OpenGeo's charter is (I claim) fundamentally different from what OSGeo's charter is/should be -- I don't see any there is or should be any "competition" between the two groups.

 

It would be a useful exercise for the meeting to try and agree on a "response" to their statement quoted below.  Not for publication or anything like that, but rather just using their quote as a strawman position for exploring the design space.

 

-mpg

 

 

From: board-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:board-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Peter Batty
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 11:06 AM
To: board at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

 

I don't know if any of you have listened to this podcast from Adena and Joe at Directions magazine, with their predictions for 2012:

 

http://www.directionsmag.com/podcasts/podcast-predictions-for-the-geospatial-marketplace-2012/219405

 

They talk about open source starting at around 13:30. The interesting thing is that they predict that OpenGeo will "become the go to company for information about open source tools ... it doesn't seem like OSGeo, which had been that leader before, is taking on that role."

 

Now I don't always agree with Joe and Adena, and I've told them that on occasion :), but they are widely listened to in the broader geospatial world, and their views are probably representative of a lot of folks in that space. And I can see where they're coming from to some extent - part of it probably relates to letting Tyler go, and part of it I think is that (IMO) we are not doing enough to get the word out about open source to the broader geospatial community (which of course will be a topic of conversation in Seattle). I might try to connect with Joe and/or Adena before we meet to talk more about their perspectives (in particular Joe said he was disappointed in FOSS4G - I suspect that he felt it was too technical with not enough content for newcomers, and in that regard it's a shame he didn't attend the newcomer day which I think he would have got more out of, but it would be interesting to chat in more detail about his thoughts).

 

I plan to write more on my thoughts about our strategy etc before Seattle, and encourage others to do the same, but thought this was worth sharing just as an input to the thought process.

 

Cheers,

    Peter.

 

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