[OSGeo-Discuss] Romanian local chapter

[Vasile Craciunescu]

Hi Arnulf,

Thanks for you warm welcome.

> I am personally always interested in integrating business and
> commercial activities with the FOSSGIS community. From what I
> see on the Wiki page currently there is not much presence in your
> emerging local chapter from that side yet. I suggest to
> consider contacting some companies directly, Romania will probably
> also have some businesses actively involved with FOSSGIS.
> If you don't feel like talking to businesses you can also send me
> some contacts directly and I will proceed to contact them. I
> can see that http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile does not even list
> Romania yet. We should amend this asap.

True. We are more like researchers than people running our own
business. But we also know most of the companies activating in the
geospatial business in Romania. I'm very interested to get in touch
with representatives from some of this companies to make them look at
fossgis solutions. Especially from relative small companies, most of
them deploying web based geospatial application. Some of this guys
spent a lot of time developing their own solution to publish maps over
the Internet and re-inventing a lot of wheels. We plan to have a
special fossgis section at an upcoming national conference
(December or January) to present OSGeo and some application build
entirely with free software. We also plan to organize a 1 day workshop at
this conference to get as many students and representatives from
companies to demonstrate the power of tools like Open Layers,
Geoserver, PostGIS over proprietary or in-hose made tools. At this
point i'm aware about only one or two small companies that are offering
open source based geospatial solution to their customers. In the following days
i'll try to get in touch with them to be listed on OSGeo Service
Provider webpage.

I'll write some more as we go through with OSGeo related activities.


Vasile