FOSS4G 2009 - Day 4

The final day of the conference was a welcome relief for me. The only real trauma was Jody's GeoTools tutorial. At the beginning of the break as he was running off to the demo theater to get things going, he looked around the booth for his box of dvd's and print material and couldn't find it. After a quick pass over the booth myself, I ran to the tutorial room to make sure it hadn't migrated there and then tracked down Michael Bedward, Jody's partner in crime for the tutorial, to make sure he hadn't moved it. Of course he hadn't. So back to the booth to dig through every box in the place. It turned out it was in plain sight, but had been moved under the table and had some spare propaganda and a program dropped on the top to hide its true contents.

I managed to attend Andrea Antonello's presentation on jGRASS, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but had to flee before Silvia Franceschi's related presentation. Instead I attended Ben Caradoc-Davies talk on Application Schemas in GeoServer, which was a good talk in and of itself, but more review for me than I had hoped. Andrea Aime's talk on GeoServer in Production follow Ben and gave heaps of valuable information; much more that I had been able to scrounge up from the lists on my own.

The late-afternoon sessions were started with the WMS Shootout, which was presented in a lively and engaging manner by Andrea Aime and Jeff McKenna. The results are already posted and the whole shootout is in svn, reproducible by all and a great basis for ongoing performance comparisons. I wonder if this could be ported to DuckHawk.

The CCIP discussion was frankly a poor reflection on the good work that the CCIP actually did. I can't comment in much more detail, as I wasn't awake for all of it. The Sol Katz award was presented to the very deserving Daniel Morissette, who I was finally able to meet on Tuesday, and a passionate closing by Cameron Shorter to cap of the day.

The end of the conference was a strange feeling. So much work has been poured into it by so many people over the last year, most of it seemingly in the last month. With everything finished, and everything successful, I suddenly didn't know what to do with myself. I met some people for some meat and wine and the Meat and Wine Company. We deferred our plans to make a serious investment in wine for a day, since Jody and I were both in pretty poor shape. I went to sleep before 11pm for the first time in a month. Bloody hell that was nice.

But... what happened to day 3?

Day three was a long day for me. I was assisting Jody with a uDig-based tour of the Live DVD in the morning and so we both had to blow off Ignite Spatial on Wednesday to go back to the office and get it finished. I made it through the three out of the four available workbooks and got some slides put together for an overview of PostGIS. It was a late night and it made for a rough morning. The tutorial was fairly successful. Because it was completely hands-on and required a laptop, or a neighbor with a laptop, we had around 40% of the prospective attendees walk out at the start. It actually worked well, and those that stayed behind got a good tour of a number of services, though we didn't get through all the material. I only made Simon Greener's presentation, PostGIS and Oracle Spatial, and enjoyed that, though the slides were too complicated to fully ingest at the rate of delivery. Simon was a very entertaining presenter which more than made up for it.

Thursday night was also the dinner cruise and Bird of a Feathers. I rolled into the PostGIS BoF with no particular plan to be awake, let alone useful, but found myself called upon to provide some direction. I didn't, but the call itself was enough to get people talking. There was some great discussion of how people are hacking up raster-ish support, the hacks and use-cases of real users and even some excitement about Paul's work on the geography datatype. I had to flee earlier than I had hoped to make the dinner cruise.

The cruise was plenty good. They handled my special dietary needs quite well, but the food was overcooked. The wine was not. I only sampled the sparkling and the red and both were very nice bottles. Between exhaustion and free bar, it was a fun night. We didn't really get much value from the cruise aspect of the dinner cruise. We left Darling Harbour and sailed under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Most people were on the viewing deck with their cameras blazing, but then the drinks and food was eminent were drained so we returned below deck. The views out the windows were nice enough, but I was left feeling that we could have made better use of the whole I'm on a boat phenomena. Bow jumping for example, or water skiing.

The result of the whole day three experience was that I didn't have a blog post in me. Not that there wasn't bloggable material, clearly, but consciousness and coherence was not in the cards by the time my day was done. I beg your forgiveness.

FOSS4G 2009 - Day 2

The first real day of FOSS4G began today with a spectacular keynote session by Paul Ramsey. I made it's way onto YouTube by lunch and has been all the talk on Twitter. If you haven't seen it yet, you should do so. I'll wait.

Due to my committments to both organisation and boothery, I only managed to make one session during the day. Volker Mische presented his work on GeoCouch, the spatial extension for CouchDB, to a large, but widely dispersed crowd in the Auditorium. The presentation was much better than his ad-hoc explanations over beer; likely due to the reduced heckling that large spaces and microphones bring. I was able to catch the set-up of the first of Jim Groffen's tutorials with Andrea Aime, and the set-up and take-down of the second with Arne Kepp. With back-to-back sets, I held no envy for Jim's afternoon. Even still, the rooms were packed and attendees were leaving happy. At least, those that got a seat were leaving happy.

Tomorrow is another day, and my morning includes assisting Jody Garnett with a tutorial session. As such, we've absconded the venue and hidden ourselves away to complete and rehearse our material.

Until tomorrow then.

FOSS4G 2009 - Day 1

Day one of the FOSS4G conference has come to a close, and by all reports has been a resounding success. I would like to mention a few names: Jeff McKenna (the wisdom of the ages), Daniel Branik (our system and network manager from Arinex) and Julia Vernon (conference manager from Arinex). Without these people things would have fallen apart weeks ago. My thanks to you.

As for the workshops themselves, I didn't have the pleasure of actually attending one, other than my own, but everyone I've spoken to has had nothing but good things to say. The effort all of the workshop presenters have put in to their material both today and in the weeks and months leading up to today have served them well and it's because of these efforts that so many people have finished today with a smile on their faces. Well done to all of you.

Beyond FOSS4G

The FOSS4G conference has been consuming the majority of my waking hours for the last few months, but with the conference in sight I'm beginning to see a little light shining back at me from around the edges. So this begs the question, what to do when FOSS4G is over?

The obvious answer is to code. The code sprint is running all day Saturday and is not strictly constrained to programming. Efforts such as the Live DVD and OSGeo Marketing and Education will be represented as well. Anybody with an interest in an project, subcommittee or endeavour is free to organise a group, or join those already signed up.

While some keeners will be sprinting all weekend, my plan is for a more leisurely walk on Sunday. The Seven Bridges Walk is a 25km stroll around Sydney Harbour, crossing three of the cities picturesque bridges (and four that are more on the functional side). For those not up for the distance, shuttle buses will be running around the course throughout the day to take you back to your point of origin. Having taken part in the walk last year, and having to run the final leg due to a late start, this year I'm heading out bright and early this year. Drop me a line if you're keen to join.

All of this is nice, but it neglects some of Sydney's greatest assets. Where are the beaches? Well, in keeping with tradition, they are found on the coast. No trip to Sydney would be complete without a stop at the worlds most famous beach, Bondi Beach. Public transport to the beach is readily available near the conference center and will deliver you in under an hour to one of the highest density tanning locations in the country. If you're not a fan of the crowds, Manley Beach is another tourist-owned-and-operated destination that is easy to get to, but far enough from the city to ease the congestion on the sand.

And if I'm still not tickling your fancy, there Taronga Zoo, the Sydney Opera House, the markets at Paddys or The Rocks, the Sydney Fish Markets, the Sydney Theatre and Dance Companies and even our very own Starbucks. And that's not even touching restaurants, pubs, clubs and proper cafes.

There are no excuses for being bored in this city.

Speaking Notes

With the conference looming and my own workshop shaping up, I've found myself thinking more about my presentations skills. Fortuitous timing indeed to have this tidbit drift through my LinkedIn notices. While I've made significant progress in the last few years, I'm still a chronic sufferer of 'Aack, people' syndrome. I've found the enunciation trick in the past is very helpful for maintaining pace, especially with some thoughtful pauses strategically placed to allow me to gather my wits before proceeding. With proper pacing comes a certain degree of calm.

There's also the 'Ummm' phenomena that I've seen take down some presenters hard; which Paul has thoughtfully provided some advice on. What else do people run up against when in front of crowds, and what solutions are available?

Have Your Say, the FOSS4G Way

The fact that the submission of abstracts for FOSS4G 2009 closed over a week ago without my noticing betrays that I've been under the pump lately, but I've finally had the chance to hit the voting site and have a look at the results. The line-up is more impressive than I'd hoped. With much of the knowledge and experience of our industry distilled into bite-size chunks, it's hard to know where to start. My recommendation: start by letting us know (before Sunday, June 28th) what you want to see or you may be sorely disappointed. Of the 170 or so submissions, my personal highlights reel includes:

• PostGIS and Oracle Spatial (Greener)


• Geoprocessing in the Clouds (Schaeffer)


• Geodata and CouchDB (Mische)


• Web Mapping Performance Shoot-out (Ramsey)


• Visualising animal movements in 'near' real time (Madin)

FOSS4G Workshops and Tutorials

Months ago when I volunteered to chair the workshop committee for FOSS4G 2009 I was convinced it wouldn't be too much work. There are only ten workshops after all. For the most part I was right, but not for the reasons I expected. There was some writing involved; producing calls for submissions and templates for prospective instructors to fill in, but there were examples for me to draw from.. There was some thinking and research to put into the rating system I used to select workshops, but others were free with their advice and experience.

Where things started to bog down was once the ratings came in. We went through two iterations of ratings before arriving at our final selection. I made the decision early on to involve as many people in the selection as possible, in part because I had submitted a workshop of my own and wanted enough transparency to avoid awkward questions. I got more of a response than I had expected considering how far off the conference is, and the fact that I insisted on people justifying their opinions made for an interesting conversation indeed. In the end my role was mostly an administrative one. I collected the ranking and comments and spat out results so we could go through it all again. With the final recommendations approved by the local organising committee, I sat down tonight and churned out 33 emails to 40 potential instructors sharing the excitement and the disappointment with each.

I've discovered that being the unpleasantness of being the chair of the committee is not the work involved. It's watching your favourite fail. I did manage to get my workshop in, but it should come as no surprise that it's not my favourite. I already know most of the material, so it will be largely review for me anyway. But there were a few submissions that I was eyeing, wondering if I could slip away from my responsibilities to do the unthinkable and crash a workshop.

But enough of my ramblings. The interesting bit here is who was selected!

Tutorials

A Friendly Hands-on Survey of Popular Geospaital Services
-- Jody Garnett, Mark Leslie, and Andrea Antonello

Delivering data using published application schemas
-- Rob Atkinson, Ben Caradoc-Davies

Getting Started with MapWindow: An easy-to-install, easy-to-use free GIS for Windows
-- Dan Ames and Ted Dunsford

How to Cope with GeoSpatial - Intro to GeoTools for the Java Developer
-- Jody Garnett and Michael Bedward

Introduction to deegree iGeoDesktop
-- Hanko Rubach

Leveraging OGC Services with GeoExt
-- Andreas Hocevar

Making Maps Fast - Performance tuning and Tile Caching
-- Arne Kepp and Jim Groffen

Making Maps Pretty with Style Layer Descriptor
-- Andrea Aime and Jim Groffen

Protecting OGC Web Services with the 52°North Security System
-- Jan Drewnak

Sensor Web Enablement - Bringing Sensors into SDIs
-- Arne Broering, Simon Jirka, Christoph Stasch, and Thomas Everding

Using ILWIS with its PostGIS plug-in for raster-vector applications
-- Rob Lemmens

Working with GRASS-GIS Vectors and Databases
-- Richard Chirgwin

Workshops

Getting Started with MapServer
-- Jeff McKenna, Tyler Mitchell, and Pericles Nacionales

Geospatial BI with FOSS: an introduction to GeoMondrian and Spatialytics
-- Thierry Badard and Etienne Dubé

Introduction to PostGIS
-- Mark Leslie and Paul Ramsey

Introduction to the Open Geo-Stack: PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, and OpenLayers
-- Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, Paul Ramsey, and Tim Schaub

Making Maps Fast - Performance tuning and Tile Caching
-- Arne Kepp and Jim Groffen

OpenLayers - Your Foundation for Browser Based Mapping
-- Tim Schaub and Roald de Wit

Organising your geospatial data and services using GeoNetwork opensource
-- Jeroen Ticheler and François Prunayre

Practical Introduction to GRASS and related software for beginners
-- Paolo Zatelli, Marco Ciolli, and Clara Tattoni

Practical introduction to MapFish, the web 2.0 mapping application
framework
-- Claude Philipona, Cédric Moullet, Frédéric Junod, and Eric Lemoine

Working with GeoServer
-- Justin Deoliveira and Andrea Aime

Moving Target

It seems that no sooner have I finished blogging than the world shifts around me. At the time I was not sowing lies, but due to a slow response from presenters the deadline for submissions of workshops and tutorials for FOSS4G has been extended by one week to March 9th. So finally, score one for the procrastinators.

FOSS4G 2009 - Workshops and Tutorial

After much procrastination, some humming and even a little hawing I've finally put in my submission to run a workshop this October at FOSS4G in Sydney. The process is quite painless, requiring only an abstract, description and some details about your presentation experience. Tutorials are also welcome, but act fast as the call for submissions closes on Monday.

Conference Booths

Back at the Queensland Spatial Conference I found myself with a fair bit of time to check out other booths and compare them with what we had. I'm well aware that we were doing that conference on a shoe-string, but there was such a difference between the experiences of ours booth with others that I managed to write up a full-page list of things we were missing. Most would be fairly cost effective to pull together. Unfortunately, that list seems to have succumbed to the ravages of time and neglect, or more likely I recycled it.

With LISAsoft's recent work on the Live DVD, I'm once again thinking about my conference booth experiences of the past and future, so I thought I'd see what I could remember. The following points are things that I would like to have when representing OSGeo at conferences.

• Live DVD
  
  This one we've got a good start on. It still needs some love, but it's sufficient to be passed out. Basically, it gives people something interactive to take home with them. I'm fairly pragmatic, so I have no grand illusions that every disk we hand out is a convert that will extoll the virtues of FOSS4G software, but if one in ten use it, and a few of those show a couple of colleagues, it's well worth the cost and effort.


• Demo Laptop
  
  This will seem obvious to most, but at the Queensland conference, I made the choice to leave my laptop at home and bring my camera instead. It was a good decision, considering the conference was at Surfers Paradise, but since Cameron's laptop was buggered, it left us without anything to demo on. But simply having a laptop isn't enough. We need much of the trappings that the Live DVD needs as well:
  
  
  
  • Decent quality sample data loaded and optimised, where possible.
  
  
  • Services installed and configured to connect and style sample data.
  
  
  • Applications installed, configured to connect to services and linked from desktop.
  
  
  • Pages populated with interesting links to documentation, list aggregators, examples, case studies, etc.
  
  I set up such a laptop before the WALIS conference in Perth, and it was very useful. Even when I wasn't demoing on it there were applications running and looking pretty. The effect was much better than an empty table.
  


• Handout Propaganda
  
  We had some fliers on the table, but they were leftovers from a couple conferences ago. It looked bad to have such a small subset of what we were discussing. They were also spread across the table in a tidy, but unappealing manner. Other booths had a variety of document stands to present their material in a much more compact and visually pleasing manner.


• Wall Propaganda
  
  Our walls were bare. Looking at the variety of wall-candy around the show room, I realised that we don't actually need real content on our walls, just some eye-candy to draw people in and make us look organised. I figured two banners would do nicely.


• OSGeo Logo Banner
  
  I don't envision this one having too much content. It could be one of those pointless banners that shows an attractive couple looking at a puppy, or a computer tower doing some rock climbing or something. The biggest requirement is a big green OSGeo logo, and some stuff. It's sole purpose is to catch the eye so a passer-by will take a second look.


• OSGeo project listing
  
  I know these are hard, and they get out of date pretty quick, but I think it could be made to look pretty impressive. I remember ages ago someone put together a diagram that showed the interdependencies of various projects. It wasn't restricted to OSGeo, and I don't think this banner would need to be either, but it could provide the content for this. It's the kind of impressive, complexish-looking thinger that makes people stop and try to understand. The fact that they never will just gives you more time to chat.


• Standing Banners
  
  
  
  • Project Banner
    
    We have one of these, generously provided by AutoDesk, and it looks pretty good. It has the logo, our mandate and a list of projects. It could stand to be updated to include recent projects, and maybe have a bit more colour, but is perfectly servicable as it is.
  
  
  • Interesting Banner
    
    This should match the other banner in basic layout, but needs a bit more to read. I haven't quite figured out what to include here. Quotes from recognised names, examples of large or high profile users of OSGeo stuffs seem to make sense, but would need to be updated and are next to impossible to get generic enough to be applicable to most conferences, and yet interesting enough to want to use. A timeline of OSGeo projects might be interesting as well, and would certainly be impressive.


• Case Study / Project Book
  
  This is asking a lot. Various projects have been trying to compile lists of case studies and projects using their products for ages. We should have quite a few around by now. By compiling them all into proper prose and screen shots, we could bind them up into a book and bring a couple copies to the booths. People are always interested to know who's using this stuff, and while we can point them to web sites or give them examples we know about, I feel it would be much more powerful to walk them through a couple examples in the book, and give them a chair while they browse the rest. There is considerable work in putting something like this together however.


• Table Cloth
  
  This one looks petty on paper, but when you are manning a booth with an bland white sheet covering your table, or worse nothing, it starts to make sence. By getting a simple black tablecloth with an OSGeo logo embroidered, emblazoned or emcrayoned on, we immediately look more prepared, more professional and more credible. This is my choice for the most cost-effective addition to our current booth efforts.

I'm sure I've missed a lot of things, including OSGeo swag (I take great joy in standing at the OSGeo booth with my ESRI thermal mug), booth personnel uniforms (which I'm personally opposed to) and the like, but this is my wish-list. I'm well aware of the time investment required to get most of these steps started, and once we have material, be it text for the book, designs for the banners or content for the DVD, we still need to find the money to produce them. Many of these are consumables as well. The reason we had such a poor selection of propaganda for the Queensland conference is that we gave most of it out at WALIS, and didn't get more produced. Our next conference is likely to have only two projects represented on paper. If we want to project a professional image, I feel we need to develop these resources. Once the legwork of putting creating the content is complete, it will be up to the local representatives attending conferences to decide what resources they actually need and how they will finance them. But that's a different blogging entirely.

Queensland Spatial Conference

This week brought me up to the classy little town of Surfers Paradise for the annual Queensland Spatial Conference at the Holiday Inn. Cameron and I arrived Thursday morning, but only just, at ten to noon. We setup the OSGeo booth, lovingly donated by the conference organizers, and tried to get ourselves organised for the afternoon workshop.

AutoDesk was putting on the workshop, with MC duties provided by Andrew Bashfield. First up was Cameron Shorter, delivering a talk about the business case and advantages of open source and open licensing. The talk covered the basics very well, but some elements were written from the consultant point of view. Since we were speaking to a room full of government agency representatives, he glossed over some of these to focus on the more relevant tidbits.

My presentation was next. I've given this same presentation a few times, originally writing it for the WALIS Forum in Perth. The difference was that at WALIS I had half an hour and felt rushed. Here, I had 15 minutes, and I had added slides that were omitted previously due to overlapping topics. Fortunately I hadn't spent much time reviewing the presentation, so I had forgotten much of the interesting detail that eats up so much time. I'm still new to presenting at these functions, so I'm not comfortable with how I sound when heard half through the speakers and half through my head. I'm also not used to the blank looks of participants. I heard nothing but positive feedback after the fact, but only one person in a room of 26 seemed to be listening. One guy, front row center, looked like he was about to fall asleep and plummet from his chair the whole time. He didn't, but it was close.

Next was Zac Spitzer and Sam Majid from Ennoble Consultancy. They took the group through a case study based on a deployment they performed at Ballarat University. It was quite lively, and my first proper look into MapGuide. Zac was an especially good presenter, considering he is a techie, but managed to meet with my biggest presentation fear. He finished five minutes early. After a few seconds of 'whoops', he proceeded to continue his talk by adding his personal commentary on the project and the use of open source. Aside from being quite impressive under pressure, it was the most interesting bit for me. It's all too rare that I get to hear from the technical side at these events.

Afternoon tea follow the Ennoble presentation, which was chased by a round table discussion. This was what I was looking forward to most at the conference. The room was divided into three groups, with a couple of the presenters 'chairing' each group, and the discussion topic was given: "What are the impediments to uptake of Open Source solutions?" My group was fairly lively, with half the participants controlling the floor most of the time. It was great to see the passion people had, not so much for the open source, but for their issues with their IT departments. I won't go into all the detail of the results, but a quick summary of the points that stuck in my mind follow.

IT Department

• Policies don't allow Open Source.
• Technology strategies are set well in advance and are not amenable to change.
• Desktop systems are so locked down that no experimentation is possible.
• Must be able to prove the utility/advantage of Open Source to effect policy change.
• The above two make the change process very difficult and tedious.
  

Vendor Neutrality

• Tenders are required to be vendor neutral, but...
• They must integrate with existing proprietary and sometimes closed protocol systems.
• Proprietary is seen as lower risk: "If you buy it, it must be better."
• "Nobody gets fired for buying ESRI."
• It's very difficult to migrate from the status quo.
  

Open Source

• There is no support for Open Source. (lies, but it's a visibility issue)
• Time is required to investigate the available options and make recommendations.
• Security of Open Source is perceived to be laxer than proprietary.

Proprietary

• Proprietary vendors not responsive to customer needs.
• License costs are formidable.
• Proprietary vendors often build blocks for integration with outside products.

None of this is especially revolutionary, but I was surprised how much frustration I saw towards the IT departments, especially considering the horror stories I've heard about administrating and maintaining some popular proprietary packages.

Finally, there was a presentation from Milton Lofberg, walking the group through the production of a web map using MapGuide. Milton walked us through the process starting with loading data into the repository, right up to adding widgets to the map view. It was a long presentation, but showed the power of MapGuide Studio to bring web cartography to the masses through a well-thought-out and mostly intuitive interface.

I spent the rest of the conference at the OSGeo booth. It was time well spent, with many advocates and many curious delegates finding their way to us. I fielded quite a few questions on the licensing issues surrounding Open Source software, especially in government, and there was a great deal of interest in simply knowing what we have to offer. All in all, it was a great excuse to see Surfers Paradise, and a productive effort in promoting awareness of OSGeo, as well as LISAsofts support of Open Source Geospatial products.