On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 10:59 -0700, Anselm Hook wrote: > Now that foss4g is over - I did have one comment about it. > > As far as I was able to understand foss4g wanted to charge $600 > dollars for speakers to present. Maybe I misunderstood this? It just > seems so bizarre and so alien and such a speed-bump that it really > didn't make any sense to me. It was like a socialist take on open > source - where everybody has to carry equal weight. This is why I > dropped my participation with prejudice - apologies to the folks who > wanted to see my talk. >
I've already let off steam over this on the osgeo conf dev list (so I'll be a little more polite here), but for me this is a heap of rubbish. FOSS4G is about the gathering of the open source geospatial tribes. It's about community. It's our chance to get together, swap stories, tell each other what we're up to and share ideas. If you need to be paid to do that, don't bother. If you don't have the passion to be a part of that community, that's fine. Just don't expect us to pay you (the speaker, by way of discounts) at the expense of other participants to come and tell us what you've been up to. A significant part of our community does what they do for the love of it. Yes, many (most?) of us make a living out of it, but open source doesn't discriminate between those who earn their money from it and those who only do it for the love of it. The neotards are just as important and welcome as the paleotards. As a gathering of the community, we'd like to try and reflect that in FOSS4G. That is why we have a deliberate policy of making the conference as accessible as possible to the entire community. It's not about everyone carrying equal weight. It's about everyone having as much chance as possible of contributing. That's why the conference travels to such "far away" places as Cape Town, South Africa and Sydney, Australia. Not just the likes of Victoria, Canada or Lausanne, Switzerland. > There is good work from the GIS open source enthusiasts - PostGIS > extensions, MapServer, OpenLayers - effectively from people who are > now financed by GIS companies and are now GIS insiders. Part of what > makes this innovation great is that it is open source at all - in a > world where ESRI dominates. > > But there's a problem in the open source GIS community. It is being > constantly innovated into by outsiders. And you see this as a problem? This is the nature of open source, geospatial or otherwise. I'd see this as one of the great strengths of open source. > It doesn't seem to innovate outwards. Sorry, but my experience is very different here. I've seen open source create solutions that just haven't been matched elsewhere. > And this means that often new work doesn't leverage old expertise. > I constantly watch new ideas struggle to find ways to manage geometry > and solve problems that have already been solved. > Nature of open source. Multiple implementations happen all the time. Yes, it would be nice if we could be more "economical" sometimes, and maybe we could be much better at sharing our solutions (hey, why don't we lower the barriers to sharing our ideas some more?) but that's part and parcel of the nature of open source. You can't stop someone doing their own thing. > Look at the list of recent innovations. Why didn't OSM come from > inside the GIS community? Why didn't tiling and tile caches come from > within the GIS community? Why do mapping solutions deal with temporal > data so badly? Why is transient and volatile ephemeral data so > difficult to manage with classical GIS solutions? Why do they deal > with client side persistence and real time streaming so badly? Why do > strangled phrases like "volunteered geographic information" get any > airtime? Why does the average video game toss around 100k polygons > phong shaded lit polygons at 60 fps while most GIS clients struggle to > show even 10k lines at 1 fps? > Within the GIS community? Don't you mean the /traditional/ gis community? Ok, so we have a new bunch of people playing in the gis sandpit. Isn't that great? Maybe we should break down the barriers to the gis sandpit a bit more and get more outsider input and ideas. For the life of me, I can't see that as a bad thing. No person or group has a monopoly on good ideas or insights to a problem. Given enough eyeballs, every problem is shallow. Lets get as many eyeballs from as many different directions as we can. If we try and confine our solutions to come from a predetermined mindset (traditional gis in this case) surely we are all the poorer for it. > Projects like tonchidot, work in ambient computing and augmented > reality coming out of university research labs, or google, and random > hacker teams - and seem to in part be re-inventing the wheel. They > have their own formats, they seem to emerge full cloth with no > history, they act as if nothing else exists. Beware of premature optimisation. In solving a new problem, get it solved before you try and optimise. Sometimes that means re-inventing the wheel, because often until you do solve the problem, you don't actually understand it properly. As inefficient as it sounds, I think it's often the path of least resistance and the most economical in the long run. Once you have found a solution, and understand the problem then you can optimise (or use the best solution, new or existing). > Why aren't more crazy new ideas coming from (or supported in part by) > established players such as say MetaCarta or ESRI or um, even > (although perhaps not strictly fair because we've seen a fair degree > of innovation here) from Poly9 or Urban Mapping? > > Maybe I'm wrong here - it's hard to really see the whole landscape - > does the EarthMine team come from a GIS background for example? Maybe > NASA WorldWind is also a good example of something amazing that comes > from the 'inside'. No matter how big you (company, community, industry) are, you're always smaller than the sum of everyone else. To me it makes sense that there will always be great ideas coming from "everyone else". That's what often gives the impetus for us to change. When you create barriers to participation (closed in ecosystems, closed formats, closed comms protocols etc) you reduce the stimulus from "outside" and hence reason to change. Maybe that's one reason why we've seen so little innovation from the traditional established gis players before open source gis got airtime? > > Basically I'm trying to understand if people holding new ideas could > afford to fly to somewhere far away like South Africa, pay an entrance > fee, and help spark innovation and dialogue and get feedback with > people who are truly expert and could make their vision fly.... and if > not then how to suggest fixing it. Some of those new ideas will _come_from_ South Africa. To me that's as good a reason as any for OSgeo to seed participation in the open source gis community in places like that with FOSS4G. Entrance fee? We'd love to have none. Unfortunately events like that cost. As part of the FOSS4G 2009 organising team, I can assure you we're working hard to keep the cost as low as possible for *everyone*. We'd love to reduce the barriers to participation as much as possible. > > In any case my recommendations for foss4g are, > > 1) Sponsorship to reduce costs overall. Believe me, we're constantly chasing this. We'd love to hear from anyone who has sponsorship ideas, no matter how crazy. > > 2) Speakers should be discounted to foster new participation. > This year's delegate is just as likely to be next years speaker. Reducing costs for speakers means increasing costs for delegates. We'd like to make the spread of ideas as free as possible, which means reducing costs for both. Given our registration costs are so much lower than many traditional conferences, I think we're getting there, though we'd love to go much further. For me the key to spreading ideas is passion, not pay. > - me Regards, Tim Bowden -- Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again. _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
