[California] Getting Started With More Than Conferences

[Ragi Y. Burhum]

Landon, this is something that I have been thinking about myself and I have
mentioned it to a few people. I am interested :)

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 10:53:51 -0800
> From: "Landon Blake" <lblake at ksninc.com>
> Subject: [California] Getting Started With More Than Conferences
> To: <california at lists.osgeo.org>
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> The second thing I would like to explore is getting a group of chapter
> members with programming skills together to work on a small open
> source project. I'm not looking for a huge commitment here. I think a
> handful of us could accomplish a great deal with just a couple of
> hours a month. I imagine we will need to organize our programmers
> around a common programming language. Java is the language that I am
> the most skilled in, but I can code in Ruby, Python, C#, VB Dot Net,
> and as a last resort, C. I can certainly participate in a project with
> one of these other languages if I have another chapter member that can
> look over my code.
>
> Do we have any programmers that can code in any of the above
> programming languages that would be interested in working together on
> a California Chapter project? Which language do you prefer?
>
>
Your forgot C++. That is my primary language of choice, however I can
probably crank some code in any of the other languages except Ruby. However,
I do not ever mind learning a new language.

Whatever we write, I would rather make it cross platform and able to code in
a *nix platform, which makes any of the Dot Net languages not a great choice
:) (sorry, no mono for me)


> We could select an existing OSGeo project that needs help, and tackle
> one of their main issues. Or, we could work on a new tool. I think we
> will be most successful if we keep our project's goals modest and
> simple.


Totally agree.


> I've always been interested in the following areas:
>
> - Metadata management.
> - Working with time in GIS.
> - Cartographic map production.
>
> Is there a particular tool you've been wanting to build or a problem
> you've been wanting to solve? Is there an OSGEo project on the brink of
> extinction that could
> use some new life blood?
>

When I code on my free time, I mostly do it for fun and to experiment with a
new technology. The result is usually that what I end up with something that
I like a lot, but is not terribly useful.

Some things that I have discussed with other people in the past:

More Fun (that would probably require fun learning from myself):
- Leveraging OpenCL (http://www.macresearch.org/files/opencl/Episode_1.mov)
or CUDA in GDAL or some other library (I am extremely interested on this
topic) or even for cartographic output
- Georeferenced video processing.
- GIS support for Mobile devices (mainly iPhone).

 Useful(?):
- A versioning (ESRI's sense of versioning) alternative for PostGIS.
- Creating an ***easy to use*** Geoprocessing Web Service for developers and
put it in AppEngine or somewhere else where anyone that wants to do
buffering or intersections or any of the standard GIS functions that we take
for granted can do so. Brinding geoprocessing to the masses :)

Let me know if you are interested in helping with either of these
> activities. I'm not sure how much support we have for these, but I'm
> willing to coordinate and put together some teams if there is
> interest.
>

I am interested

- Ragi
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