Growing the FOSS4G Community

PowerPoint Presentation

Growing the FOSS4G CommunityJeff McKennaGateway Geomatics

2008-11-07 | OSGeo 2008. All rights reserved

- thanks for having me in Japan again- from Canada- work background (DM Solutions Group, to Gateway Geomatics)

Outline What the community means to me

In the beginning...

Current community

FOSS4G conferences

Local chapter growth

Future

Challenges


- only 20 slides-

Community?


a body of persons of common and

especially professional interests

scattered through a larger society

- coming together through email lists, IRC sessions, annual conferences, local events

- compared to the sports community: - 21 years of competitive ice hockey- brother played in the top professional level for 8 years- global community

- now i have been involved in the Open Source geospatial community for over 10 year

Without the Community

I am... just another geographer

unable to access other resources

bored

looking for places to travel :)

looking for people to have a drink with :)

unemployed


- i am not a developer

- i can't develop software from scratch

But With the Community

I am... part of a network of thousands of users,
developers, and decision makers

able to partner with other organizations

always busy

able to travel :)

recognized as a key member of the
community


And I am Able to

Become... chair of the OSGeo conference
committee

MapServer Project Steering Committee
member

Founding and Charter member of OSGeo

Founding co-chair of OSGeo Ottawa
local chapter


- become MapServer for Windows (MS4W) maintainer- become MapServer documentation lead- become a power user in the MapServer community

In the Beginning...


individual user meetings across the
world

no global organization

many projects were immature

- 2003 MapServer Users meeting contained no other Open Source projects

- no ability for organizations to support Open Source in general (sponsorship)

Important Events


OSGIS 2004, Ottawa, Canada

- projects included: MapBender, Mapbuilder, GRASS, MapServer, JUMP, PostGIS

Important Events


- members of MapServer community participated (workshop at end of conference)

- my first introduction to the 'rest' of the Open Source geospatial community (e.g. Italian meeting)

- Max exchanged with DM Solutions studying GRASS use for Environment Canada

Important Events


+

= ???

Important Events


OSGeo founded in February/March
2006

goal is to promote the use of Open
Source geospatial software

structure includes Board of Directors,
Executive Director, and Committees

- projects from Web Mapping (MapServer, OpenLayers), Desktop (QGIS, GRASS), libraries (FDO, GDAL), other (Geonetwork0

Current Community


1474 person yearsEffort$81,072,382Replacement Cost200Contributors16Projects5,450,649Source Lines of Code

OSGeo Stack:http://www.ohloh.net/stacks/151/report

Becoming an OSGeo Project


Code is under an OSI approved license

Geospatial

Mature

Strong user community

Substantial and diverse developer community

...

http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/evaluation.html

The MapServer Project


ready to graduate and become an
official OSGeo project

5.2 release in July 2008, with nearly
200 tickets closed

5.4 release in early 2009

- 1993 thesis- open source 1998- starting to focus more on user needs (installers, documentation)

FOSS4G Conferences


steady growth in attendance

large corporate sponsors (Google,
ESRI)

2010 host to be determined by
December

- 2006 in Lausanne, Switzerland (CamptoCamp)- 2007 in Victoria, Canada (Refractions)- 2008 in South Africa-

Sol Katz Award


Awarded annually by OSGeo to those
that have demonstrated leadership
in the community

- 2005 FrankW- 2006 Markus Neteler- 2007 Steve Lime- 2008 Paul Ramsey

- Sophia Parafina (Ionic/Erdas)

Local Chapters


steady growth

locations include Australia-NZ,
Germany, Finland, UK, Korea, Spain,
Italy, France, Quebec, Japan, India,
South Africa, Brazil, Netherlands,..

- 2008 Annual General meeting

What about the Future?


focus on more OSGeo local events

more reliance on local chapter work

possibly a community-based site for
OSGeo users

FOSS4G2009 in Sydney Australia

improved installers for projects

Is the Community Easy to

Work With?


NO! Is my bug fixed?

The documentation is out-of-date

I'm new,...

When is the next release?

Challenges


language barriers

avoid being NA-centric

giving credit to both small and large
organizations

attracting sponsorship to support the
community

What Does theCommunity Need?


YOU!

documentation

testing

answering questions on mailing lists


Jeff McKennaGateway [email protected]

Questions?Shibuya: 2008-11-03

Growing the FOSS4G Community

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