[Aust-NZ] FOSS4G Day 3

[Chris Tweedie]

Thanks for the updates Brian. I do not agree with the comment about
Australia missing out on the opensource GIS / concepts. In my experience we
are very much at the front of the pack, but for some reason we often shy
away from the spotlight and lurk in the community instead. This is my hope
that OSGEO-Au will bring a lot of these people (you know who you are) out
from the shadows. Its not just individuals either, a lot of corporate types
are actively using OSGEO projects but for whatever reason, don't advertise
this very much.

Attendance comes down to cost and distance ... Canada is just as prohibitive
as Switzerland in this respect, times by about 100 for Government approval
for international travel. South Africa i have already pencil'ed in and
fingers crossed that our Sydney bid gets across the line so we can get more
people in attendance for future conferences.

Keep updates flowing !

Chris Tweedie



-----Original Message-----
From: aust-nz-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:aust-nz-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Brian Bishop
Sent: Thursday, 27 September 2007 4:50 PM
To: FOSS Mail List; aust-nz at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Aust-NZ] FOSS4G Day 3

Managed to survive the conference dinner tonight, held in the BC
Museum. Great venue and talked to 2 of the 3 NZers at the conference.
Apart from Tim Bowden and a couple of others, have not met many
Aussies at the conference. This indicates that the Australian public
are missing out on a lot of innovative concepts in spatial systems and
public participation. (Any Aussie at the conference with a different
view?)
Learnt last night that my colleague Liz, had travel problems and could
not make the conference. It would be really useful to be part of a
team covering the interesting presentations. For example tomorrow
morning, the first half hour session has 5 presentations, 3 of them
are my priority areas. Again I probably will miss the fun one.

An important question for me is, now that I have some understanding of
the components for a robust Spatial Data Infrastructure, where is the
glue to tie these components together. Proprietary tools like FME have
been suggested, however the team at Camptocamp demonstrated a toolset
that looks promising. Being Opensource, can start experimenting
straight away.

Openlayers is the talk of the web presentation clients, however
Mapbuilder and Ka-Map  are being used for some cool applications also.
Adding analysis muscle to the newer desktop clients is a theme, with
uDig, gzSIG and Qgis all featuring analysis extensions. Grass is still
there and gaining more of everything you would expect from a mature
high end GIS. Check out JGrass.org if you are interested in this area.
The Qgis team needs C++ programmers to help with bug squashing. This
is a great way for programmers to start helping with an opensource
project.

Goodnight and goodluck.
Brian
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