Our logo contest has concluded and our conference committee have selected a winning logo.
The logo continues the compass point theme from the past two FOSS4G North America conferences in Washington D.C. & Minneapolis. It also pulls in the ribbon theme from the global FOSS4G. The bridge is a nice reminder that the event will be held in Burlingame, a short distance from San Francisco. The conference runs March 9th to 12th, 2015.
Congratulations to PixelNodes, the winning designer. And thank you to 99designs for hosting the contest.
An interesting cluster of articles from last fall drew my attention. One from November entitled “FOSS and the Sublimation of Commodity Fetishism” is an interesting look some factors that others have cited contribute to diversity issues. In short, not everyone can afford to work for free on open source software.
The author writes:
“The participants in F/OSS communities are, in fact, compensated for their labour. Not with money, but with social capital.”
The not compensated with money part is misleading. I’d like to revisit the social capital part in another post later.
A more recent article by Matt Asay, rebutting Quentin Hardy’s “Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money“, notes that a great deal of open source is developed by employees of companies such as Google, Amazon, Linkedin, Netflix, and others. They do so because their products and services they sell are based on open source rather than selling the open source software directly.
Simply put, the core team in large open source projects tend to be professionals rather than volunteers.
Next March (9th to 12th) in San Francisco, FOSS4G North America will bring together the open source geospatial community for an epic few days of learning, networking, and camaraderie.
We need a suitable logo for an event of this magnitude and importance so we have started a logo contest with an attractive cash prize. All are welcome to contribute designs, and we encourage people to provide ideas & feedback.
The contest is hosted by 99designs here.
Also, in case you missed the news from last week, Rob Emanuele was named program chair for the 2015 conference.
Next March, we’ll be hosting FOSS4G North America 2015 co-hosted with EclipseCon from March 9th to 12th. This conference is a wonderful collaboration between multiple communities. With participants from Eclipse, OSGeo, LocationTech, IoT, Science, and other communities of open source communities, we anticipate some weird and wonderful cross pollination of ideas. Attendees can attend any talk they wish for no added cost.
One of the biggest contributing factors to the value and success of the conference is the quality of the program. The program committee, led by the program chair, is responsible for selecting which presentations are part of the program at FOSS4G North America.
It is my pleasure to announce that Rob Emanuele has agreed to be program chair for FOSS4G North America 2015. Rob is best known for his work on the GeoTrellis high performance geoprocessing framework. His combination of breadth and depth of technology skills, along with his ability to connect with people will serve the program committee well. Thank you Rob! And I look forward to working with you to make this an outstanding conference in 2015.
A friend of mine is a single mother who is unfortunate enough to live in a rough neighbourhood. She has been getting abused rather badly by her neighbours. As one example, they vandalized her car in various ways including denting the car repeatedly down the length of it. The following is a picture to illustrate:
Dents on car door.
She has gone to the police. They stated that she had no proof and that was the end of that.
She’s a student and moving isn’t a feasible option.
This blog post is a call for ideas. Has anyone reading this been in a similar situation? Do you have any advice or suggestions for her? Suffice it to say any ideas are gratefully appreciated.
It is my pleasure to announce that FOSS4G North America will be held on March 9-12, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, California.
This event will be hosted at the same time and place as EclipseCon North America 2015 and the LocationTech Summit. This event is a great collaboration between Eclipse’s LocationTech, OSGeo, and a gathering of the FOSS4G community.
We’d also like to thank and announce the conference committee who will be involved with planning the event. They are:
- Andrew Ross – Chair (andrew dot ross at eclipse dot org)
- David Bitner
- Eddie Pickle
- Robert Cheetham
- Ragi Burham
David and Eddie are past FOSS4G NA chairs from 2013 and 2012 respectively. Eddie and Robert were also valuable members of the FOSS4G 2014 bid team in D.C.. We expect to add a couple more members to the team in the weeks ahead and assemble a program committee who will select the program.
The conference will feature hands on workshops, presentations, demos, exhibitors, social activities, plenty of opportunity to mingle, and more. More details will be announced soon.
A shout out in thanks to the OSGeo board for the opportunity to present about this event and their support extended during the April 10th OSGeo board meeting.
Like many geeks, I have long admired and respected Neil deGrasse Tyson. In the following video, Neil talks about 3 drivers that inspired great & expensive accomplishments. Or, in his words, “how to get something done in modern times” and “drive tomorrow’s economies”.
After much reflection, he felt there are 3 and only 3 drivers:
- Praise of royalty/deity, which he feels is less relevant today
- War, which is less relevant today
- Search for Economic return
Today is day 0 of EclipseCon. This means there are a number of great Tutorials and Working Group Meetings today. In addition, the annual general meeting takes place at 3pm in the Waterfront Ballroom 3 room.
In the evening, there is a choice of interesting events including Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings, an M2M Hackathon, Ignite LocationTech Boston, and capping things off will be Eclipse Late Night at the Tamo bar at the Seaport Hotel.
Hope you enjoy your day!
I noticed the following earlier today from Nick Downie:
“An apology to open source
At midnight on the 18th March 2013 I posted Chart.js online. On the morning of the 19th March, I’ve had to take it down due to IP concerns with my current employer.
It had been my final year university project I had been working on for a couple of months. I had intended it to be an open source project for the web design and development community.
Since posting it online, I’ve been completely overwhelmed and hugely grateful for all the support and kind words.
Sadly though, due to concerns from my employer regarding intellectual property and similarities in projects I’ve worked on, I’ve been asked to take down the site. My job and livelihood have to be my primary concern. With this in mind, I have closed down the site, and removed my master branch from Github.
I’d like to personally apologise for taking this away, I’m just as disappointed as you.
Nick”
This kind of thing is really tragic. In this case, it seems to have worked out perhaps as I notice chart.js is back on-line. I’m guessing of course, but I suspect a small employer might wisely weigh the potential for much negative publicity and be forced to quickly approve. The code may benefit from the extra visibility and attention.
This kind of thing isn’t rare unfortunately. The Vert.x project went through a similar situation recently. The discussion in that case was worth the read to see how the Vert.x community weighed their options and came to consensus.
The quick lesson for open source developers is that intellectual property really does matter and it is worth educating yourself on the issues so you’re as prepared as you can be and avoid painful mistakes. Github by itself is not enough.
Some of you may have already been following the discussions taking place in the Ubuntu community. For those who haven’t, it has been a very interesting, relevant, & passionate examination of Ubuntu’s release management processes/cycle including Long Term Support.
Particularly interesting in the discussions is the proposed move from a regular release (not unlike the Eclipse simultaneous release) to a rolling release concept. One of the latest posts on the topic is from Mark Shuttleworth including a strawman proposal.
The Eclipse community has had its own discussions about the right approach in this regard. Notably around the switch to Eclipse 4.x and balancing stability/robustness/performance against innovation, evolution, and timely acceptance of contributions. Alex Kurtakov from Red Hat wrote an excellent blog post inspired by the LibreOffice community & hitting on some of the pain points hindering community development and encouraging newcomers to contribute within the Eclipse community.
The work the team has recently done to move the Eclipse platform to the Common Build Infrastructure has made it much more accessible & easier for people to build than it has been for the last 10 years – just a single command. The major overhaul of Eclipse’s IP process also makes things a lot easier. The Long Term Support working group and forge offer new possibilities for support and maintenance that were not available before. These are significant in the history and evolution of Eclipse. Each is a big deal on its own. Collectively they have massive potential. We need your help to ensure they are used to their maximum potential.
At EclipseCon 2013 in Boston (March 25-28th), there are meetings where you can learn more and participate in the discussions. Space is limited so please sign up in advance with the links provided below:
- Long Term Support Information Session (open to all)
- Common Build Infrastructure Session (open to all)
For those of you who might not be able to make it to these sessions, I encourage you to participate in discussions on the CBI & LTS mailing lists.
For those that are interested in getting started with Eclipse, moving their project to build with the CBI, hacking the code on an interesting project, or meeting some pretty amazing Eclipse committers – we are also holding a Code Sprint. We have a few more spots left for those who wish to participate.
42aross 