shrug-l: Open Source Geospatial Foundation

[watry at steam.coaps.fsu.edu]

The Open Source community created an organization called the Open 
Source GeoSpatial Coummunity (OSGeo.org). The first organizational 
meeting was held in early February included the following:  Companies:
Autodesk				 O?Reilly Books
Collabnet
Camptocamp SA
DM Solutions
Where2GetIt  L3-Titan
LizardTech   Refractions
Metacarta  Organizations:
Earth Observation and Geospatial Technology for Civil Society 
Consulting Center for Geographische Informationsysteme
The Open Planning Project
Open Source Software Institute
Minnesota DNR

Universities:
Iowa State Univ.
Penn. State Univ
Univ of Minnesota
Istituto Trentino Di Cultur

This organization is still in its formation state but as it grows will 
be the clear house for many open source projects.

This organization will have divisions for Web service applications 
(some at or above parity to Commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS)
Desktop applications (some at or near parity to COTS)
Regional Database management systems (some at or above parity to COTS)
Mapping tools as add-ons to the above three.  
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As for the Open Source Class we started in January, we currently have 
more than 60 people either taking the course or monitoring the course, 
These include Public sector (City, County, State, and Federal 
Agencies), Private Sector (GIS and software companies), educational 
institutes (staff and students from at least 6 universities including 3 
in Florida), and people from North and South America, Asia and Europe.

We are just about finished with Quantum GIS and will move onto uDig 
(User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS). The reason that we are doing 
these two GIS packages near the front is that they both run on Mac?s, 
Windows, Linux, and are nearly as good as and in some sections better 
than COTS.

The course work for all the software will be posted to several websites 
in The United States and Canada as they are finalized.

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Over the next several months, we are going to start presenting at 
several different conferences different topics such as:
Open Source Software and the world of education
Open Source Software for the Non-GIS Professional



Gary L. Watry

GIS Coordinator
Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies
FSU / COAPS
Johnson Building, RM 215
2035 East Paul Dirac Drive
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2840

E-Mail: watry at coaps.fsu.edu



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