Archive for category Advocacy
Stack Overflow for GIS Launches from Area 51 into Orbit!
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, Open Data on July 22, 2010
Whoo hoo!
The Geographic Information Systems Area 51 proposal has entered the private beta period. Over the next week or so, folks who committed to the proposal have a chance to create the initial shape of how this site will work for our community. If you committed, don’t forget to go to http://gis.stackexchange.com/ to help out on this critical part of the process!
After this week, it will open to public beta, where a wider audience will be able to access it, and the community norms will be further refined.
While I was waiting for this proposal to reach the beta phase, I participated in the Pro Webmasters proposal, and it’s been a blast! I highly recommend that you have a look on the Area 51 staging website and see if there are other areas where you can lend a hand, or where you might need some intelligent collective answers.
As a reminder, all of the content on the Stack Exchange sites is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike licence, so these are truly community resources we’re building.
-J
OSGeo BC Meet-Up July 27 (during GeoWeb)
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, OSGeo, Open Source on June 21, 2010
Martin recently announced that we will be holding an OSGeo British Columbia meet-up in Vancouver on July 27. We have timed this to coincide with GeoWeb; it falls on the Tuesday evening after the workshops are over and before the conference sessions start.
This session is open to all, so if you’re going to be at GeoWeb, or are in the area and want to hang out and eat pizza with some Cool GeoGeeks (oxymoron?) RSVP on the wiki!
We’re also looking for some presentation ideas; if you’ve got a burning desire, then please propose a topic on the wiki.
-J
StackOverflow For Geo!
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, Open Source on June 14, 2010
If you’re not familiar with StackOverflow, it’s a collaboratively edited questions and answers site for developers. With its wiki-like editing and community voting and reputation system, answers at StackOverflow (and its sister sites like ServerFault) are more complete, accurate, and accessible than any other technical resources.
With this understanding, I was excited to see that George Silva was involved in StackExchange’s incubator, and had put together a proposal for a StackOverflow for Geographic Information Systems.
GIS has long been more of a diaspora than an online community, with information stored across dozens of mailing lists, forums, blogs and other locations. Each open source project and proprietary application has its own set of resources, as do academic communities. Answers have been hard to find, and expert participation in these communities can quickly lead to burn-out. I believe that having a StackOverflow for GIS will help to solve these problems, and increase our individual efficiency working with GIS.
If you agree, please take the time to sign up for George’s proposal, and commit to being involved in StackOverflow for GIS!
-J
Vancouver’s Open Data
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, Open Data on September 15, 2009
Congratulations to the City of Vancouver on the launch of their Open Data Catalogue.
They have launched with what looks like a couple dozen datasets (including orthophotography and other GIS data), with a custom license agreement.
This is a great start, and I understand that the folks at Vancouver are working on pushing out more data sets as rapidly as possible. Make sure to take their survey if there is something in particular you are interested in.
-J
On the Shoulders of Giants?
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, Open Source on August 11, 2009
I was recently reading a post by Gordon Luckett about how he’s been able to use Google Maps and Bing layers in MapGuide / Fusion maps. This is only possible because the Fusion project decided to build on top of OpenLayers, and recent builds of Fusion have enabled the OpenLayers commercial base maps.
This got me to thinking about the amount of work that the MapGuide project is leveraging every time you see a map. MapGuide directly includes about a dozen open source libraries. Many of these (such as FDO, GDAL, GD and Fusion) have their own stack of libraries that they depend on. With a bit of digging, I quickly ended up over 30–I’m sure I could have gone further–and this doesn’t even count the open source utilities such as GCC, Ant and SWIG that are integral to turning all of this code into something you can use.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter how cool your code is, you’re really just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants, we’re standing on the shoulders of thousands of regular people who have dedicated their time to help build this ecosystem. We have to make sure that we in turn enhance other projects where possible, and provide a solid base for those who come to build on our work in the future.
-J
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