[intl-discuss] Australian OSGeo Chapter

[Arnulf Christl]

Tim Bowden wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> There is a move to create an Australian OSGeo Chapter.  See the wiki
> page at http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Australia.  Discussion about the
> formation of the Chapter is starting to move to the international
> discuss list; see here
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/www_international-discuss to
> subscribe if you're interested but not already subscribed.
> 
> There is a tentative informal face to face meeting going to be held in
> Sydney on the evening of Tuesday 2nd Jan; venue not yet decided.  If
> you'd like to attend, drop me a line (tim.bowden_at_westnet.com.au).
> There will be another informal meeting in Perth a week or so later.
> 
> Regards,
> Tim Bowden
> Mapforge Geospatial

Hi,
at http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Australia it says that: 

[...]
...but Open access to geospatial data is not one of the goals of OSGeo (according to OSGeo's About page). 
[...]

at http://osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html in the second bullet it says:

"To promote freely available geodata - free software is useless without data."

The term "freely available" is obviously good for interpretation but it should cover the part of the Local Chapter Guideline requirements. Seeding and growing a local chapter can be quite an issue therefore we chose "guidelines" instead of "rules" and have various levels of formality starting with a simple Wiki page. 

>From my perspective OSGeo its about three meta level issues:
* Software (curr 10 projects, some already graduated, formal Incubation committee)
* Education (formal committee, several work groups)
* Geodata (formal committee, several work groups including meta data)
The last bullet refers both to accessibility of public geodata (as now also promoted through the European INSPIRE) and really, really Free data (with capital F) like they are producing at OpenStreetMap from scratch, or are available for free (fx. postal codes of Germany). 

For the first steps in creating a Local Chapter it is definitely not required that you host, start, publish or do whatever about a spatial dataset. But as I learned at a EuroOSCON presentation NZ seems to have sold all of its geodata to a private company and now has to buy it back in bits and pieces. Ican imagine that for NZ a free set of geospatial data would probably be quite high up on the wish list.

Best regards, 
Arnulf.