FOSS4G 2011: Report
2011-09-20 22:35
The FOSS4G 2011 is over now. Time for a small report. The crowd was amazing and it was again the ultimate gathering of the Free and Open Source for Geospatial developer tribe. Solid presentations and great evenings.
My talk: The State of GeoCouch
I'm really happy how my talk went, I really enjoyed it. The were lots of people (although there was a talk from Frank Warmerdam at the same time) asking interesting questions at the end.
The talk is not only about GeoCouch but also gives you an overview of some of the features it leverages from Apache CouchDB. In the end you should have an overview why you might want to use GeoCouch for your next project.
You can get the slides right here.
- The slides (download optimized) as PDF (licensed under CC-BY-3.0-de).
- The slides with comments as HTML (licensed under CC-BY-3.0-de).
- The slides with audio. It’s the recording of the actual talk at the conference.
Other talks
I was happy to see that there was another talk about GeoCouch. Other talks I really enjoyed were:
- CartoSet, a new FOSS to create highly visual geo portals: So many true things were said, e.g. get the data from the customer first, before you start building anything.
- Introduction to OpenSource WebMapping: Beyond Google Maps: A very nice introduction off the full stack for web mapping. From the database, over the server to the client. It's for people that have no clue that they could have maps on their own infrastructure.
- Comparing GeoExt, MapQuery and Legato from a technical and collaborative point of view: A good comparison between GeoExt, MapQuery and Legato. I especially liked the “Bodo”-test.
- Beyond vectors: Adapting remote sensing research for environmental monitoring with open source hardware and software: Citizen mapping the BP oil spill with balloons and kites: Kite and balloon mapping is just awesome. It's kind of the OpenStreetMap for raster data.
- GeoGlobalDomination: The Musical: One of the highlights was the GeoGlobalDomination musical. Grab the video while it's hot.
And of course there were also great talks from in the plenary sessions from Paul Ramsey about Why do you do that? An exploration of open source business models and Schuyler Erle's so funny lightning talk about Pivoting to Monetize Mobile Hyperlocal Social Gamification by Going Viral
Code Sprint
At the code sprint I was working on MapQuery together with Steven Ottens and Justin Penka. Steven was working on TMS support, Justin on a 6 minutes tutorial and I on making manual adding of features possible.
The OpenLayers developers did the migration from Subversion to Git for their development. OpenLayers is now available on Github.
And luckily there was a fire alarm in between to take a group photograph.
Future of the FOSS4G
I really hope there won't be a yearly FOSS4G conference for the whole of the US. There should be regional events, as I think one big one would draw the attention away from the international conference. Why should you fly to Beijing for the FOSS4G 2012 if you can meet the majority of the developers in the US as well?
Final words
The FOSS4G was great. It was organized well and people were always out in the evenings. The only minor nitpick is that many people working remote had the city of their company in the name badge and not the one they live in. It seems that the original for you had to fill was confusing. So for next year it should perhaps say “Location where you live”. Hence I still don't believe that there were more Dutch than German people at the conference (Tik hem aan, ouwe! ;)
Categories: en, CouchDB, GeoCouch, MapQuery, Erlang, JavaScript, geo