Introduction to OSGeo
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Tzotsos, Angelos
Adams, Till
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to foster global adoption of open geospatial technology by being an inclusive software foundation devoted to an open philosophy and participatory community driven development.
 Hello everybody, welcome to our presentation. We give introduction to the OSGEO today. My name is Till Adams. I'm the chair of the OSGEO board and my colleague is... Hi, I'm Andilos Drotsos. I'm the OSGEO president and I'm happy to be on a Bosdum conference. So we're talking about the open source geospatial foundation, our OSGEO in short. And the goal is for us is to empower everyone with open source geospatial inspiration, software, whatever you want. And we're going to present some aspects of OSGEO foundation now. So, yeah, we want to empower everyone with open source geospatial. And how do we do that? We can state that OSGEO is a not-for-profit or a nonprofit software foundation. And what we do is we provide financial, organizational and also legal support to our project. What we also do is an outreach and advocacy. So we try to promote the global adoption of open source geospatial technology all over the globe. We have a lot of partnerships on open approach to standards, to data, to education. And one of the most important things is OSGEO is volunteer driven. So if you look about on a map of our members, you see we have passionate members from all around the world. If you look to Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, North America, Europe, all over the globe, you will find people who are active members of OSGEO. So how do we try to reach our goals? How do we try to empower everyone with this open geospatial? I think one of the most important things is open source. So as you all know, we are at FOSDEM here. Open source is a collaborative approach to software development. We try to support our open source projects or open source development. But we also have a focus on open data. There was a really, really important talk on one of our conferences a few years ago where somebody said, your software is useless without data. Data should be freely available. Everybody should be able to use it as he likes to or she likes to. Of course, we also have a focus on open standards because we want to avoid login with inter-rubble software. So in our world, we have a huge standardisation organisation. It's called the Open Geospatial Consortium or OTC. Maybe you heard about that, which is really important partner for us, but also other things. Of course, we are also keen on open education in order to remove the barriers to learning and teaching. Of course, with our software, we have a huge collection of workshops, training material, whatever you can find on our website or our wiki. So everybody is able to take that material and to start their own training course on our software. We have also a focus on open science because of course, if everybody shares data and software, this really could lead to responsible research. So this is also an important part of our goals. We are supported by sponsors worldwide. If you're not on the list, no problem. You can get on the list. We are open for sponsorship. Of course, these are just a few companies, but if you know at least a few of them, you can see we are supported from companies all over the world as well. And yeah, the most important thing is, OSGEO is volunteer driven. I said that before, but if you look at that picture there, you see hundreds of individuals. They all have fun together. This one was taken at FOSFORG, which is our main global event we normally have once a year. That one is very special for me because that was 2016 in Bonn and I had the honor to chair this conference. But what I want to say is all we do is we do it in a kind of doocracy. So whenever you're inside the OSGEO environment and inside OSGEO world and you have an idea, and you want to find people who share this idea, who help you with your idea, the idea is conform, goes conform with our goals. Just do it. So we are open to anybody who takes the initiative to do something. Yeah, this is how the membership in OSGEO works. So the most important point is point three. If you want to get a member, which is of course open and free, you just self declare that on our wiki. So you care that you get a wiki account and then you're a member of OSGEO. That's as easy as it could be. I'm not sure whether the number is totally up to date, but there are about 1,250, 1,300 members worldwide actually on our website. Once being a member or even not, if you're not a member, you can participate in our mailing list. You can take part in our events. Of course, every project is open for help. So you can send pull requests, write documentation, report bugs, all the regular stuff you can do on open source projects. Actually, we have about, or I think the number is from November last year, we had about nearly 36,000 unique subscribers on our mailing list. If you're a member and you can get elected to be a charter member, and as a charter member, your only duty is that you can then participate on the vote on the board elections. So once a year, we have the board elections. And to get a charter member, another charter member has to propose you as a charter member. Charter member trip is normally a lifetime thing. So from the, I think most of the charter members of the 487 we have for now are active members. There's the board of directors, which is Angela's, our president, and I'm also a member of the board of directors. We have, in the moment, we have nine directors in a two year term, which is one year we vote for and next year we write a vote for five new directors. So there's a vote every year. And yeah, I would say the most important thing we have is not the board or the the Hirachi we have in our foundation. Most important thing are our committees. So if you can see on the left side of the slide, we have a lot of committees which are more or less self organized. There's a code of conduct committee. There's conference committee which supports our mainly our main globally when we have once a year. The conference committee consists mainly of former chairs of former global conferences. There's a committee called due for all which cares about all kinds of open education. There's an incubation committee that cares about that if new projects come in to check whether they go along with our rules in order to get it incubated project and in OSG. We have a marketing committee. There's a marketing material spread the words or power our social media channels, whatever we have an open Geo Science committee. We have all the project steering committees which are really important. So in every open OSG project, there's one project steering committee that cares about the software related things of the various projects we have. There's the United Nations committee. And very important also the system administration committee the suck which cares all about our server infrastructures and stuff like that. So we deliver server infrastructure of course for our mailing list for our projects we host projects there and stuff like that. So this is what we all do. And of course, every of these committees also open. And if you have ideas and want to participate in one of the projects it's more or less just going to the mailing list and say hi, I'm here I want to I want to help. This is about our projects. So there's a link to find all of our projects. So we have two kinds of OSG projects. The one kind are all our official OSG projects in the moment there 21 of them. And they also already passed graduation through the incubation committee as I said before, and there are some rules you have to you have to follow and get in order to get an official OSG project. And the barrier, a little bit lower are our community projects. In the moment we have 24 community projects we are really happy to have new to new community projects who came into OSG last year. And there are many more projects are pending. And this is a normal way if you have an open source project related to due spatial if you want to incubate it to those to you. You normally start as community project and then you go the next steps in order to get a full incubate it's OSG project. Okay, that's from my side and I think now, Andriyla, it's time to pass over the ball to Athens. Thank you. So, let's, let's see a bit more details about our projects, these are the projects that have been graduated with, which means that they have passed all the quality criteria that the incubation committee is setting for each project to be able to graduate the graduation process. So we, we have several categories of projects in OSG like the, the special content management systems, desktop desktop applications, libraries, metadata catalogs, web mapping servers, spatial databases and we are, these are the main categories we have. Those, those projects have been very widely used. And once you find some of them in many, many important deployments over the world, like national, the SDI special infrastructures or open data portals, or even on daily, daily usage by important projects all around the world. So just one more comment on that we also have a project that is special to us is the OSG live project which we use for marketing purposes, but also for demonstration purposes and there's a dedicated talk about the OSG live project coming up later by Astrid. So in the OSG projects, you can find projects that are very, very old, like grass is over 30 years old now, but you can find newer, more, more young projects but the quality criteria for us is to have sustainable communities and be able to, to, to, to, to, for the projects to develop a long time. One more detail about the projects is that you assign an officer for each project so it's not just this project steering committee, but we have officers and those officers are responsible for reporting to the OSG board yearly. So that the OSG board had an overview of, you know, if there's a problem with the project or if there is a need of supporting either with funding or legal support or any other kind of support that we can provide to our projects for for projects that have not yet graduated the incubation process we have the community project projects the community program, where smaller projects or projects that have not yet reached the incubation status can can apply. And this is a very low barrier and point for projects, some of those projects have applied for incubation, some of them have not yet applied but that's, that's not the point the point is that we have a community and the community wants new projects and as technology goes forward. We are, we also need to have more products included. So, at this, at this moment, maybe it's a good time to go to the, to go to the website actually and, and show you a bit about the website of Osgeo. This is the Osgeo.org is our homepage. This is where you can find all the information about Osgeo, the structure, the resources, the, the, the project that we have. If you don't know which projects fit your needs, you can easily go through our wizard, we have a choose a project wizard where you can, you can start looking and we are, we are trying to help everyone to find an appropriate open source technology for their needs. This website will help you find the appropriate software and technologies available from the Osgeo stack. And also you can find the projects here in a list or you can, you can find dedicated project pages where we have a community picture or we can direct somebody to a demo of the project or even to the website of the official website of the project and, and you can find more information about this about features, standards that are implemented and who are the developers behind the project. Then we have several resources about Osgeo, like what, who, who is on the board and who are the officers. We have news events, all of these, all of this information is listed on the Osgeo website. How somebody can contribute to Osgeo, this is, this is one, one very important aspect of Osgeo since we are a nonprofit and volunteer based organization. If we need all the contribution we can get volunteers are the heart of the organization and without them, the organization cannot work. There are many ways that somebody can contribute joining and contributing to a project is the, is the first one on the list, because contribution to a project will will help the project grow. And, and this can be done with, with several ways, either with full request and code by sponsorship, or with writing documentation translations, doing presentations, filing bug reports. So, if you can join a committee is a very important thing because committees are the, the, the, the, are the groups that are doing the heavy, the heavy work in the organization. Then we have initiatives initiatives can be either joined or created we are open to create new initiatives if there's a group of people that are very interested in a special topic. Important things that you, somebody can do is host and organize events, like coach prints like conferences, and also we need help without rates, like people that can help us maintain the website, or actually do some some promotion of open source just special in governments organizations, companies, etc. Also, we have a partnership built up process. Also, another important thing is that somebody can build or join a local chapter, because OSGO is, is everywhere in the world and we have local chapters, some of them are official in terms of they have legal entities behind them. Some of them are not official, but they are local groups, local communities of people that are joining forces to promote OSG on a, on a local level. OSGO has obviously been affected by the COVID pandemic this year. And we, we were not able to do our international post for G this year. So, post for G is the global conference that we organize as still mentioned earlier. And we are, we are now in the process of planning the post for G 2021. And we have not yet reached the decision whether this is going to be an on site or an online event. Original post for G conferences showed up and happened during lockdown, mostly with online events, and many local chapters stepped up and made a local event. And actually, because it was virtual, more people were able to join all around the world. We also did in November a virtual code sprint. Now we are on on the process of organizing a new code sprint in February with Apache Software Foundation and also open just personal consortium. Now, a bit more information about the post for G 2021, which is going to be hosted in Buenos Aires, it's, it's planned to happen in late September. This year, there's a big local committee, local organizing committee that is working very hard to make the conference happen again. There's a website where you can already register and and tickets are already been out. And there's an open call for papers. So with that, I want to thank you. And I hope you and you are enjoying post them this year, and hope to see you in person.
 Hello everybody, welcome to our presentation. We give introduction to the OSGEO today.  My name is Till Adams. I'm the chair of the OSGEO board and my colleague is...  Hi, I'm Andilos Drotsos. I'm the OSGEO president and I'm happy to be on a Bosdum conference.  So we're talking about the open source geospatial foundation, our OSGEO in short.  And the goal is for us is to empower everyone with open source geospatial inspiration, software, whatever you want.  And we're going to present some aspects of OSGEO foundation now.  So, yeah, we want to empower everyone with open source geospatial.  And how do we do that? We can state that OSGEO is a not-for-profit or a nonprofit software foundation.  And what we do is we provide financial, organizational and also legal support to our project.  What we also do is an outreach and advocacy. So we try to promote the global adoption of open source geospatial technology all over the globe.  We have a lot of partnerships on open approach to standards, to data, to education.  And one of the most important things is OSGEO is volunteer driven.  So if you look about on a map of our members, you see we have passionate members from all around the world.  If you look to Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, North America, Europe, all over the globe, you will find people who are active members of OSGEO.  So how do we try to reach our goals? How do we try to empower everyone with this open geospatial?  I think one of the most important things is open source. So as you all know, we are at FOSDEM here.  Open source is a collaborative approach to software development.  We try to support our open source projects or open source development.  But we also have a focus on open data. There was a really, really important talk on one of our conferences a few years ago where somebody said,  your software is useless without data. Data should be freely available. Everybody should be able to use it as he likes to or she likes to.  Of course, we also have a focus on open standards because we want to avoid login with inter-rubble software.  So in our world, we have a huge standardisation organisation. It's called the Open Geospatial Consortium or OTC.  Maybe you heard about that, which is really important partner for us, but also other things.  Of course, we are also keen on open education in order to remove the barriers to learning and teaching.  Of course, with our software, we have a huge collection of workshops, training material, whatever you can find on our website or our wiki.  So everybody is able to take that material and to start their own training course on our software.  We have also a focus on open science because of course, if everybody shares data and software, this really could lead to responsible research.  So this is also an important part of our goals.  We are supported by sponsors worldwide. If you're not on the list, no problem. You can get on the list.  We are open for sponsorship. Of course, these are just a few companies, but if you know at least a few of them, you can see we are supported from companies all over the world as well.  And yeah, the most important thing is, OSGEO is volunteer driven. I said that before, but if you look at that picture there, you see hundreds of individuals.  They all have fun together. This one was taken at FOSFORG, which is our main global event we normally have once a year.  That one is very special for me because that was 2016 in Bonn and I had the honor to chair this conference.  But what I want to say is all we do is we do it in a kind of doocracy. So whenever you're inside the OSGEO environment and inside OSGEO world and you have an idea,  and you want to find people who share this idea, who help you with your idea, the idea is conform, goes conform with our goals.  Just do it. So we are open to anybody who takes the initiative to do something.  Yeah, this is how the membership in OSGEO works. So the most important point is point three.  If you want to get a member, which is of course open and free, you just self declare that on our wiki.  So you care that you get a wiki account and then you're a member of OSGEO. That's as easy as it could be.  I'm not sure whether the number is totally up to date, but there are about 1,250, 1,300 members worldwide actually on our website.  Once being a member or even not, if you're not a member, you can participate in our mailing list. You can take part in our events.  Of course, every project is open for help. So you can send pull requests, write documentation, report bugs, all the regular stuff you can do on open source projects.  Actually, we have about, or I think the number is from November last year, we had about nearly 36,000 unique subscribers on our mailing list.  If you're a member and you can get elected to be a charter member, and as a charter member, your only duty is that you can then participate on the vote on the board elections.  So once a year, we have the board elections.  And to get a charter member, another charter member has to propose you as a charter member.  Charter member trip is normally a lifetime thing.  So from the, I think most of the charter members of the 487 we have for now are active members.  There's the board of directors, which is Angela's, our president, and I'm also a member of the board of directors.  We have, in the moment, we have nine directors in a two year term, which is one year we vote for and next year we write a vote for five new directors.  So there's a vote every year.  And yeah, I would say the most important thing we have is not the board or the the Hirachi we have in our foundation.  Most important thing are our committees.  So if you can see on the left side of the slide, we have a lot of committees which are more or less self organized.  There's a code of conduct committee.  There's conference committee which supports our mainly our main globally when we have once a year.  The conference committee consists mainly of former chairs of former global conferences.  There's a committee called due for all which cares about all kinds of open education.  There's an incubation committee that cares about that if new projects come in to check whether they go along with our rules in order to get it incubated project and in OSG.  We have a marketing committee.  There's a marketing material spread the words or power our social media channels, whatever we have an open Geo Science committee.  We have all the project steering committees which are really important.  So in every open OSG project, there's one project steering committee that cares about the software related things of the various projects we have.  There's the United Nations committee.  And very important also the system administration committee the suck which cares all about our server infrastructures and stuff like that.  So we deliver server infrastructure of course for our mailing list for our projects we host projects there and stuff like that.  So this is what we all do.  And of course, every of these committees also open.  And if you have ideas and want to participate in one of the projects it's more or less just going to the mailing list and say hi, I'm here I want to I want to help.  This is about our projects.  So there's a link to find all of our projects.  So we have two kinds of OSG projects.  The one kind are all our official OSG projects in the moment there 21 of them.  And they also already passed graduation through the incubation committee as I said before, and there are some rules you have to you have to follow and get in order to get an official OSG project.  And the barrier, a little bit lower are our community projects.  In the moment we have 24 community projects we are really happy to have new to new community projects who came into OSG last year.  And there are many more projects are pending. And this is a normal way if you have an open source project related to due spatial if you want to incubate it to those to you.  You normally start as community project and then you go the next steps in order to get a full incubate it's OSG project.  Okay, that's from my side and I think now, Andriyla, it's time to pass over the ball to Athens.  Thank you.  So, let's, let's see a bit more details about our projects, these are the projects that have been graduated with, which means that they have passed all the quality criteria that the incubation committee is setting for each project to be able to graduate the graduation process.  So we, we have several categories of projects in OSG like the, the special content management systems, desktop desktop applications, libraries, metadata catalogs, web mapping servers, spatial databases and we are, these are the main categories we have.  Those, those projects have been very widely used.  And once you find some of them in many, many important deployments over the world, like national, the SDI special infrastructures or open data portals, or even on daily, daily usage by important projects all around the world.  So just one more comment on that we also have a project that is special to us is the OSG live project which we use for marketing purposes, but also for demonstration purposes and there's a dedicated talk about the OSG live project coming up later by Astrid.  So in the OSG projects, you can find projects that are very, very old, like grass is over 30 years old now, but you can find newer, more, more young projects but the quality criteria for us is to have sustainable communities and be able to, to, to, to, to, for the projects to develop a long time.  One more detail about the projects is that you assign an officer for each project so it's not just this project steering committee, but we have officers and those officers are responsible for reporting to the OSG board yearly.  So that the OSG board had an overview of, you know, if there's a problem with the project or if there is a need of supporting either with funding or legal support or any other kind of support that we can provide to our projects for for projects that have not yet graduated the incubation process we have the community project projects the community program, where smaller  projects or projects that have not yet reached the incubation status can can apply. And this is a very low barrier and point for projects, some of those projects have applied for incubation, some of them have not yet applied but that's, that's not the point the point is that we have a community and the community wants new projects and as technology goes forward.  We are, we also need to have more products included.  So, at this, at this moment, maybe it's a good time to go to the, to go to the website actually and, and show you a bit about the website of Osgeo.  This is the Osgeo.org is our homepage. This is where you can find all the information about Osgeo, the structure, the resources, the, the, the project that we have.  If you don't know which projects fit your needs, you can easily go through our wizard, we have a choose a project wizard where you can, you can start looking and we are, we are trying to help everyone to find an appropriate open source technology for their needs.  This website will help you find the appropriate software and technologies available from the Osgeo stack. And also you can find the projects here in a list or you can, you can find dedicated project pages where we have a community picture  or we can direct somebody to a demo of the project or even to the website of the official website of the project and, and you can find more information about this about features, standards that are implemented and who are the developers behind the project.  Then we have several resources about Osgeo, like what, who, who is on the board and who are the officers. We have news events, all of these, all of this information is listed on the Osgeo website.  How somebody can contribute to Osgeo, this is, this is one, one very important aspect of Osgeo since we are a nonprofit and volunteer based organization. If we need all the contribution we can get volunteers are the heart of the organization and without them, the organization cannot work.  There are many ways that somebody can contribute joining and contributing to a project is the, is the first one on the list, because contribution to a project will will help the project grow.  And, and this can be done with, with several ways, either with full request and code by sponsorship, or with writing documentation translations, doing presentations, filing bug reports. So, if you can join a committee is a very important thing because committees are the, the, the, the, are the groups that are doing the heavy, the heavy work in the organization.  Then we have initiatives initiatives can be either joined or created we are open to create new initiatives if there's a group of people that are very interested in a special topic.  Important things that you, somebody can do is host and organize events, like coach prints like conferences, and also we need help without rates, like people that can help us maintain the website, or actually do some some promotion of open source just special in governments organizations, companies, etc.  Also, we have a partnership built up process. Also, another important thing is that somebody can build or join a local chapter, because OSGO is, is everywhere in the world and we have local chapters, some of them are official in terms of they have legal entities behind them.  Some of them are not official, but they are local groups, local communities of people that are joining forces to promote OSG on a, on a local level.  OSGO has obviously been affected by the COVID pandemic this year. And we, we were not able to do our international post for G this year. So, post for G is the global conference that we organize as still mentioned earlier.  And we are, we are now in the process of planning the post for G 2021. And we have not yet reached the decision whether this is going to be an on site or an online event.  Original post for G conferences showed up and happened during lockdown, mostly with online events, and many local chapters stepped up and made a local event. And actually, because it was virtual, more people were able to join all around the world.  We also did in November a virtual code sprint. Now we are on on the process of organizing a new code sprint in February with Apache Software Foundation and also open just personal consortium.  Now, a bit more information about the post for G 2021, which is going to be hosted in Buenos Aires, it's, it's planned to happen in late September.  This year, there's a big local committee, local organizing committee that is working very hard to make the conference happen again. There's a website where you can already register and and tickets are already been out.  And there's an open call for papers. So with that, I want to thank you. And I hope you and you are enjoying post them this year, and hope to see you in person.
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