[OSGeo-UK] OSGIS 2010 round up

[Joanne Cook]

Dear All,

As you're no doubt aware, the 2nd OSGIS event was held at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences, and by all accounts it was a big success.

Thanks to everyone who attended both days, or who presented. Thanks also to everyone who attended the 2nd AGM of the UK local chapter. Finally- hi to anyone who's new to the list.

A brief summary of the AGM:
1) People felt that the name "local chapter" was not really appropriate for a UK audience, so we're going with OSGeo:UK as the proper title. We have permission to create a new logo (within certain limitations) so we will discuss that shortly.
2) We have a couple of new people looking to be more deeply involved in the chapter- so welcome Matt Walker as our training coordinator and Mike Saunt who's going to have a more strategic role. Along with our other active members, we have a reasonable committee (which sounds very formal, but isn't)- and enough structure to consider setting up as a voluntary association. More on that in a later email.
3) We discussed the possibility of holding our own workshops, training courses, and code sprint-type events, and a number of organisations, including the Centre for Geospatial Sciences, have kindly offered their premises for this.
4) We have had an offer from the Association of Geographic Information (AGI) to hold funds for us, rather than worry about our own bank accounts. This is something they already do for a number of other small organisations, and would be extremely useful. I'm awaiting further information on what would be required to set this up.
5) Ideally we would like to have some sort of sponsorship of the AGI conference, or at the very least a meetup of the chapter. We're looking into how best to achieve this.
6) There is growing interest in an open source implementation of INSPIRE, from a number of different organisations, and OSGeo:UK may be a good place to coordinate this- we'll see!

This is not an exhaustive list- but it's already a long email so I'll send some more information out shortly- and feel free to chip in with thoughts or comments.

I should make clear that OSGeo:UK does have a mission statement and objectives that align closely with those of OSGeo internationally. We may look at changing our objectives as the chapter grows, but our aim is to provide a neutral place for both companies and individuals to become involved in open source geospatial software. There are likely to be some concerns about competition, particularly for small businesses, but I sincerely hope this will be a place where profiles get raised, and bigger opportunities come along as a result.

Hopefully the additional interest generated at this year's event will help us move the chapter forward. I certainly hope so!

All the very best

Jo

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Joanne Cook
Senior IT Support and Development
Oxford Archaeology (North)
01524 880212
http://thehumanjourney.net


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