[Oskari-user] Interview about background and development of Oskari

[Erik Albers]

Hi all,

I am really sorry for the delay with the interview. I hope that you are still
available and my request receives you well. As you asked before, I included
the list into the interview-questions.

To remind you:
With our Public Money? Public Code! campaign, the FSFE demands that publicly
financed software developed for the public sector shall be made publicly
available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. In order to help
understand our call and its benefits, we run a series of interviews that
highlight good examples and use-cases as best practices. Our interview
partners will be policy makers and decision takers, authorities and
developers, that in one way or another are already implementing public code.

for our campaign, see: http://publiccode.eu/

for a first interview, see here: https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180601-01

I found Oskari because it was 2nd prize winner in the Cross border category at
the Share&Reuse Conference. After checking a while your homepage, I came to
the conclusion that Oskari could be very interesting to highlight as a
positive example of publicly financed software.

And now we go with the interview.  I propose the following method: below, you
will find a list of questions that we would like to ask you. You do not have
to give a detailed answer to each question. Well on the one hand, in general,
the more concise, the better : ) But also, as this is a written interview and
it gives us less opportunities to have a dialog, we will have a final edit
afterwards and maybe merge some questions into one. Maybe we will also re-ask
you about one or two details. You will finally, of course, be asked to approve
it again. Ah, and please keep to the point as much as possible : )

I hope you are fine with this method and please find our questions hereafter:


 * Can you briefly explain what is Oskari about and for whom it is?

 * What was the initial idea behind creating Oskari and not using another
existent software?

 * In your demo-version, you offer a lot of thematic maps and visualized data.
Are these all based on Open Data or where do you get all the data from?

 * Who are the people or the organisation behind Oskari and who is mainly
financing it?

 * With our campaign "Public Money? Public Code!" we demand that publicly
funded software should be available to the public under a Free and Open Source
Software license. Is Oskari an exception in that it is published as Free
Software or is this rather the usual case in Finland?

 * Have there been any concerns about publishing it as Free Software?

 * What do you think is the major benefit of Oskari being Free Software?

 * You got the Second prize in the the cross-border category of the
share&reuse award 2017 [2]. Why was Oskari chosen?

 * Do you know who is currently (re-)using Oskari or who are the active
members of the community? Is it composed of individuals or organisations?

 * Is it possible for people outside, who are interested in the project, to
contribute and, if so, how?

 * Is there something you would do differently today with regard to Oskari's
process to become Free Software?

* Which recommendations would you give to comparable projects who would like
to follow your example?


Thank you very much for participating,
   Erik

-- 
No one shall ever be forced to use non-free software
Erik Albers | Communication & Community Coordinator | FSFE
OpenPGP Key-ID: 0x8639DC81 on keys.gnupg.net