I had the privilege of giving a talk at LinuxFest Northwest this year… and what a cool event this is. We had a great room full of people interested in Geospatial technology, some great questions and I think some genuine interest from participants that could lead to some folks going home and hacking away with some mapping. Great job to the organizers of the event and looking forward to helping make LinuxFestNW 2009 an even bigger and better event!

Here are the links to my talk:

(PDF 4.5M) – (ODP 8M) – (PPT 8M)

(UPDATE 042808): They have now posted a link to the video of my talk:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/377931

(CUGOS) – For those local to the Pacific Northwest, come visit us and make some local Geospatial friends!!

Just returned from a week on the road and one of the highlights was GIS in Action, the Oregon and Southwest Washington URISA annual GIS event. There were over 300 people on site for 2 days of great talks, workshops and panels. I was asked again to host one of the Open Source sessions at the conference and we participated on Wednesday. I presented on the OSGeo, some sample applications of the Open Source GIS technology, and even had a quick online IRC chat with Chris Schmidt of Openlayers in front of the crowd. We also had Dean Anderson from Polk County talking about doing open development when confined to a proprietary environment (often the case in government). He had some great examples of developing Arc based software on SourceForge. Finally we had Deborah Bryant from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) to talk about government uptake of Open Source technology. She provides great insight to the front lines of getting Open Source accepted in main stream government. She runs the GOSCON conference and is a wealth of knowledge on the current state of Open Source in government, big and small.

All of the presentations from our Open Source session are posted in my presentation archive…

Hope all are well. I just wanted to send out a quick reminder that we will be having our first CUGOS meeting tomorrow (Wednesday – 03/21/07) at the Seattle LizardTech offices. We will kick things off at 5:30pm and wrap-up by 7pm. Some of us will most likely grab a beer near by after as well. Looks to be a great turnout with about 30 new people signed up!

I am really looking forward to meeting everyone and making these meetings a great venue for social interaction and learning for Open Source GIS professionals. See you all tomorrow!

Just posted an extended abstract for Coastal Zone 07 to take place in Portland OR July 22nd-26th. Great to get some more Open Source geospatial published…

I have posted a new presentation on Open Source GIS that I gave on Feb 21st 2007 at Portland State University. Included is an audio recording of the talk, a ppt presentation, and a flash demo of doing some simple GRASS interaction.

http://www.reprojected.com/geoblog/presentations/

Enjoy!

Aaron

Yesterday I ventured off the Island in the afternoon for a whirl wind tour of Seattle events.

1) Met with some folks from LizardTech, a GIS shop in Seattle who has been in the imagery/compression business for a long time and is really trying to re-define their business around what is happening in the GIS industry as a whole.

They are now an Associate Sponsor of the OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation) and very actively engaging parts of their business in the OS paradigm. Very cool office downtown and some great Northwest contacts.

2) Seattle Green Drinks.

A group of us hit this event at the new Seattle Art Museum waterfront sculpture garden and had a great time. Defiantly worth seeing the 60 foot nurse log… on display as a “living” piece of art. Probably one of the largest and most active Enviro social events I have been to. 300+ people all bumping into each other with free beer and wine… great stuff. With my tour guides from Umbrella Consulting I got a very good introduction to many of the organizations based out of Seattle including OneNW (http://www.onenw.org/), Grist (http://www.grist.org/), Cascade Agenda (http://www.cascadeagenda.org/), and many more. Awesome event and will hopefully be a monthly thing for me.

3) Ignite Seattle.

Wow… you have never seen so many hackers, geeks, and crazy people in one room… it was good to feel welcome! 8pm until almost midnight of straight through 5-minute talks… about 22 of them from every topic including new technology out of the Google and Microsoft labs to building a multi-person pogo stick for Burning Man! Crazy stuff, high energy event which is gaining in popularity (now sponsored by Google and O’Reilly). Again, every couple of months and a great connection to the roots of the OS and hacker community in Seattle. I do hope it does not get taken over by the corporate mongers (I hope you are listening O’Reilly!)

Paul and company up in Victoria BC have posted info about the 2007 FOSS4G conference. I cant wait for September to role around… this should be a great conference this year!

FOSS4G takes place September 24-27, 2007, at the Victoria Conference Center, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

This year the OSGeo will be taking a large role in the development of this conference and it will be great to see how it works out.  I personally have high hopes that this will be a defining moment for the OSGeo and the FOSS4G community as a whole.

Here is a link to the Presentations and Papers