Sean Gillies posted about this talk at the end of November and it just got posted on Slashdot yesterday, but it was only until last night that I woke up and watched it. While Eben Moglen might not be able to bring down the house with his camera presence, his talk on social justice and Open Source software is truly interesting and inspiring.
Well worth it… an hour well spent.
When you have Second Life making headlines in the business section of CNN. I guess it is time to sign up 
http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/08/technology/sl_lindex/index.htm?postversion=2006120812
Man you cant get any better than this:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Non-profit_Discount
We at Ecotrust just signed up… can’t beat 1/2 terabyte of storage and 5 terabytes of bandwidth… FREE!
This personal blog is hosted there as well under my personal account, but if you are a non-profit interested in playing with Mapserver/PostGIS/GMT/GRASS you can check out my post on installation in this environment to get up and running with web mapping… FOR FREE!!!
Enjoy
UPDATE (12/09/06): For those who are not in the non-profit world but are still interested in Dreamhost for cheap hosting I just created a promo code that gives the FULL $97 discount to you… Nothing to me. Dreamhost works on this crazy “reward” system for getting people to use you as a referal, offering a finders fee to the current customer. I have created this code to apply all of the finders fee to your discount… I get NOTHING. It is ZPULLEYFULL , enjoy!
GIS Projects Ecotrust, GIS Projects Personal, GIS Tool Install
A local group here at Portland State University has just announced a new mapping interface into the mix. Check out the live demos and download the code. Looks to be a great resource! Thanks guys…
We are delighted to announce a new open source framework for web-mapping, your personal Ninja of web-mapping, ladies and gentlemen, it’s:
*Map-Fu*
Available for download, contribution of code, or reporting of bugs at our not-so-secret location on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/map-fu/
It features a true object-oriented PHP-Mapscript backend, with a variety
of classes and interfaces, ease of extensibility, and other
configuration zoink-zoink.On the front end is a fat Javascript client, using XMLHttpRequest to communicate with the server for updating the map and map-related data. It employs JSON for messaging and goes for a Web 2.0 feel. Some features on the front-end include pop-up tabs for reference map, legend, map information and query results. We try to maximize screen area for the map, since that’s what we are interested in visually!
Based on Minnesota Mapserver (of course) and PostGIS, we developed this interface to satisfy actual needs of clients for creating web-mapping applications that served SPECIFIC needs and required SPECIFIC tools.
Some production sites that are using the Map-Fu or related codebase (formerly known as YAMI (Yet Another Map Interface)):
http://glaciers.us – A database of glacier change in the Western US, including a linked assets database of aerial and oblique photos from the last century
http://www.oregongeology.com/sub/ogdc/index.htm – The most up-to-date geology compilation for Oregon, soon to be used for other states!
http://oscdl.research.pdx.edu/ – Oregon Sustainable
Communities Digital Library, a temporal database of regional planning for the Portland Metro area (ten years of regional planning data, plus links to documents tied to spatial objects)We look forward to collaborating with a larger group of developers, and receiving feedback on our efforts! We’re interested in incorporating the OpenLayers interface, and “through the web” feature editing via WFS-T.
In the current vacuum of viable enterprise GIS solutions, we see this as a ripe time for rapid development!
The Map-Fu development team,
Morgan, Cris, Tim, Percy & Will
Portland State University
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I had the pleasure of attending a meeting on the WISER commons last Friday (December 1st) in Seattle Washington. It was a great meeting bringing together environmentally minded individuals and organizations that have a common “technology” thread. The event was sponsored by the Interra Project and the Natural Capital Institute. Paul Hawken spoke about the need and relevance of a “commons” and promoted a new project called WISER. The demo shown was an impressive database of socially responsible organizations around the world. I am excited to see this project grow as it is aiming to socially connect the environmental movement.
I am interested to tear into their code as the software being developed is Open Source and should be interesting. They are due to put out a public release in January!
AUDIO
Jon Ramer – Overview of the Day
Cecile Hansen – Duamish Tribe – Grounding on tribal issues and relevance to the community