[OSGeo-Discuss] Wonderfull FOSS4G 2018 Community Sprint in Dar es Salaam

[Astrid Emde (OSGeo)]

See the OSGeo Foundation news with photos at: 
https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/wonderfull-foss4g-2018-community-sprint-in-dar-es-salaam/

The FOSS4G 2018 Community Sprint was held in Dar es Salaam at dLAB 
Tanzania September 1 to 2, the weekend after the closing sessions of 
FOSS4G. This sprint brought together nearly 70 members of the OSGeo 
community, HOT and students from closeby.

dLAB - Tanzania Data Lab, located on the beautiful campus of the 
University of Tanzania, was a great place to meet with several workshop 
rooms, a nice patio (we all love patios) and a welcoming team that 
organized amazing food that was served on the patio (in fact the food 
arrived by tuk-tuk / bajaj). It was a very relaxing and calm atmosphere 
with all you need. After an introduction by the 2018 Sol Katz winner 
Astrid Emde, we split in smaller teams and worked on several topics like 
ODK, OSGeoLive, Mapbender, MapServer, GeoServer and more.

OSGeoLive
There was an introduction on OSGeoLive 12.0, the new version that was 
prepared for FOSS4G 2018. Some students tried the brand new OSGeoLive 
with a bootable stick that was handed out to them as a present. 
Everything worked fine.
Also a new language Swahili was added to Transifex (great!) and Peter, a 
student from Tanzania, made his first translations. Hopefully more 
volunteers will join to work on the Swahili translation. It is a lot of 
work.
During the Community Sprint some volunteers also worked on the Finnish 
and German translation of OSGeoLive. Thanks for all your help!

ODK (Open Data Kit)
Ping (one of the ODK developers), Iddy (from HOT) and Ivan (from HOT) 
did an introduction and tutorial session to Open Data Kit 
(https://opendatakit.org/). It is open source software for collecting, 
managing, and using data in resource-constrained environments. The 
tutorial was about creating a simple use case to get familar with the 
concepts of ODK. The students could choose between roles like coder, 
writer, translator and user.

Jose from Brazil gives feedback on his experiences:

"The code sprint was a very good experience to me. In the first day I 
could talk about the open source software I develop to manage the water 
pipes and consumers as a GIS application to two participants that were 
very interest to learn more. Better than this I also learned about Open 
Data Kit (ODK), an open source software developed with the participation 
of Google. This software enabled us to go to the field and collect data; 
then we went to the field, and returned with the data that we collected.
Later I learned how to use Transifex and started to work n the 
translation to Brazilian Portuguese that was already started by 
Portugal.
On Sunday I continue the translation and then Ivan and Ping teach us how 
to install the source code of the Collect software and we read an issue 
from GitHub and did an improvement in the software to then commit and 
create a pull request. It was approved and tested through the continuous 
integration implementation to then be delivered at the PlayStore.
I also had the opportunity to introduce information about OSGeo and the 
activities we were doing at the code sprint to a new person from 
Tanzania, that was for the first time in a code sprint."

MapServer
Jeff, Karsten and Lars where discussing how to improve the visibility of 
MapServer and how to make it more attractive to new users or even 
contributors. Multiple talking points were collected and will be 
discussed with the PSC and the MapServer comunity within the next weeks. 
Among these points are code spints and improved documentation with 
mentioning third party tools utilizing MapServer like mappyfile, 
scribeui or porting the QGIS export plugin to the new version. From one 
of the QGIS developers Pirmin Kalberer a new benchmarking tool 
(https://github.com/pka/mvt-benchmark) for vector tiles was recently 
published, and it was agreed here that since MapServer can also output 
vector tiles in MVT format, it might be worth contributing a MapServer 
test case for the MVT benchmark.

GeoServer
A team worked together on GeoServer and a delegate made his first commit 
to the projects and learned about the full process.

Mapbender
On the second day Astrid Emde from the Mapbender team and two 
participants from Pakistan had a workshop on Mapbender. They created a 
WebGIS application with Mapbender for Pakistan. In the end the team 
created an application with several WMS, lots of functionality and a 
search module for places in Pakistan. Maybe in the future Mapbender will 
be translated to Urdu and the gallery will show an application from 
Parkistan. Would be great!

OSGeo & FOSS4G
A team worked also on the OSGeo website and improved the content and 
instructions. Others discussed FOSS4G and lesson learned and prepared 
already FOSS4G 2019.

After an amazing week and a very successful FOSS4G Community Sprint 
everyone left with many impressions, new knowledge, new friends, a full 
& happy stomach, and feeling the vision of FOSS4G, OSGeo and Community. 
The Spirit of FOSS4G will now be shared by the community sprint 
attendees around the whole world.

Let us all meet next year at FOSS4G 2019 in Bucharest (Romania).

May the FOSS be with you!