European GIS Code Sprint

[Andrea Antonello]

Dear friends, dear colleagues,

we would like to raise to you all the following proposal of an European
FOSS-GIS developers meeting by the end of November (kind of follow-up
of the Canadian Code Sprint in September).

The event is the 'European GIS Code Sprint' organized as a post-event
of the SFScon 2007 held in Merano, Italy.

Planned Dates are: 
* 16-17 Nov 2007: South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2007
    (http://www.sfscon.it/)
* 18 Nov 2007 (Sunday): Outdoor GIS data collection for Free data set
    (somewhere in South Tyrol)
* 19-21 Nov 2007: GIS Code Sprint

The organisation of the event would be made by the Free Software Center
in Bolzano.

The Sprint would mainly have the aim to bring different projects to
know each other and build up some standard interaction, let the teams
of each project meet, discuss, design and code together fulltime and
non-remotely for a few days, and obviously also do some bugfixing. Also
we would invite power users in order to work on documentation,
translation and even minor issues.

In parallel, there would be the desire to collaborate on the creation of
a free dataset by wandering in an ordered way through a defined region
of the south tirol with GPS. The dataset should contain as many data as
possible, as for example the dataset of the grassbook does. Moreover,
climatic and hydrologic/hydraulic data should be integrated in order to
support different analyses.

Time is rather short and we would like to understand how much interest
there is in such an event and more or less how many developer would
like to attend. 

We feel that there is a huge need for a developer meeting that could
bring together different projects, that really need to interact if they
want to have a glorious future.

Please give us possibly soon a feedback by *adding yourself* on the WIKI
page created for the event: 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/European_GIS_Code_Sprint

Warmest regards,

Andrea Antonello
Markus Neteler