[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Stand at Linux Australia conference

[Cameron Shorter]

Below is my wrappup of my experience at the OSGeo stand.

http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2007/01/osgeo-stand-at-linux-australia.html 
<http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2007/01/osgeo-stand-at-linux-australia.html>


     OSGeo stand at Linux Australia conference

I've just come off the OSGeo <http://osgeo.org/> stand at Linux
Australia <http://lca2007.linux.org.au/OpenDay 
<http://lca2007.linux.org.au/OpenDay>>. Behind the stand were:

   * Tim Bowden
   * Milton Lofberg
   * Antel (sp?)
   * Myself


Data
Every second person at the stand asked about data, to which we explained
that there is very limited "free" data in Australia. Many of the
participants were excited by the idea of an Open Street Map
<http://openstreetmap.org/> idea and said they would be keen to enter
data if the project existed in Australia.
Education
There were a few teachers and lecturers who came past. The guy I talked
to said he used the ESRI stack for teaching. It was noted that if people
are to use the Open Source stack then we need to start at the
educational institutions. Teachers in this area should feed their notes
back into the OSGeo Education group.
Proprietary verses Open Stack
There were a significant number of questions from users of the
proprietary stack about equivalent applications for their current ESRI
product. I used Arron Raciot's slide which shows a comparison between
stacks a number of times. This slide should be converted into a handout
and/or poster.
Packaging
A guy from Red Hat offered his help to package up the Geospatial stack
for the Red Had distribution. Apparently we need to look into "yum".
A guy from Gentoo showed me that QGIS is already being packaged for
Gentoo. To get other packages included, we should add a bug report and
set up a list of dependencies and documentation.
Wearable Computing
We chatting for a bit with Wayne Piekarski
<http://www.tinmith.net/wayne/> about wearable computing. He had some
very sexy stuff. Wearing Virtual Reality glasses he could walk around an
area and mix real backgrounds with virtual objects. There are
opportunities to work with OSGeo here but we did not get much time to
talk details before the crowds came and we had to go back to our tables.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://terrapages.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254