[pdal] Point Cloud Codesprint in Vienna Nov 7th-9th

[Howard Butler]

All,

OSGeo is having its Community Sprint in Vienna November 6-9 at Austria Center Vienna [1]. This is the event that was once upon a time before the pandemic going to be the 2020 sprint. Many sponsors from the point cloud processing community sponsored the event, and that sponsorship is now finally being used.

Open source code sprints have been integral to progress in the point cloud domain. During the 2014 Vienna sprint, Martin Isenburg helped us finalize the LASzip API and finish its inclusion in PDAL. During the 2015 sprint in Philadelphia, Markus Schütz worked with us on what evolved into EPT and then eventually into COPC. During 2016, I refactored the management and deployment of the proj.org website, which with the community's continued effort, evolved into a 900+ page compendium rivaling Synder [2]. During 2019 in Minneapolis, we worked with RIEGL to solidify the RXP/RDB readers in PDAL and refactored the gdal.org website to follow PROJ's model.

Despite its name, a code sprint is not necessarily furious software engineering, although that does indeed happen. Instead, a code sprint is where high bandwidth communication, camaraderie, and collaboration can happen. Code sprints help projects satisfy their niche, strategize interoperability challenges, and share techniques. If your organization depends upon PDAL and friends to achieve its technology, consider sending someone to help us continue to evolve the technology. This might be something like the new PDAL Wrench [3] capability from Lutra Consulting that powers QGIS' new point cloud processing toolbox. Or maybe it is something else you want to add like the recent PRs from Altametris to add straightening and georeferencing filters (thanks Guilhem!). 

Whatever it might be, we would love to hang out and sprint with you in Vienna! Visit https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Sprint_2023 to sign up and find out more information. Email me privately if you are unsure about attendance or anything else.

Howard


[1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/tosprint/2023-June/000794.html
[2] https://proj.org/_/downloads/en/9.2/pdf/ 
[3] https://github.com/PDAL/wrench/