[Live-demo] Who will be at FOSDEM?

[Johan Van de Wauw]

Hello,

I know that at least Bas (Couwenberg) and I will be going to FOSDEM[1]
31 january-1 february in Brussels (Belgium). Since this year there
will be both a geospatial devroom [1] and a distributions devroom [2],
it may be an ideal timing for having a Debian GIS - OSGeo live
meeting.

I have also just been writing a proposal for the geospatial devroom
about both projects (one could argue that with a slightly different
focus it could be a proposal for the distributions devroom instead),
but we could also opt for having a BoF meeting somewhere outside the
devrooms (or even have a sprint on friday/monday?).

>From Debian-GIS to OSGeo live and back

OSGeo live (live.osgeo.org) is a self-contained bootable dvd, usb
thumb drive or virtual machine based on Lubuntu, that allows you to
try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without
installing anything.

Debian GIS is a project with the goal of making Debian the best
distribution for Geographical Information System applications. And to
make things even more complicated, there is also Ubuntu GIS, which
provides packages for Ubuntu

Even though OSGeo live is based on the packages in Debian, both
projects somehow diverted and where OSGeo live managed to get a large
(100+) community of contributors, progress in Debian GIS was stalling.
Recently however, a new wind is blowing in Debian GIS, coinciding with
the debian blends initiative. It looks like a perfect time for
bringing more of the packages and documentation on the OSGeo live to
properly managed packages.

This talk will focus on how one can contribute to both projects, and
leaves time for discussion on how collaboration can be improved, what
obstacles may need to be tackled before a wider audience could
contribute to Debian GIS.

Johan
[1] https://fosdem.org/2015/
[2] https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2014-October/002039.html
[3] https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2014-October/002047.html