On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 10:59:26AM -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.
Out of curiousity, which would you prefer: 1. an egalitarian approach, where everyone is treated the same; 2. a speaker-centric approach, where speakers get discounts and local residents and non-speakers have to pay more; 3. a need-based approach, where some funding is available for people who can demonstrate that their lack of ability to pay is a limiting factor in attending? You've got an organization behind you, as far as I know -- at least, your recent twitter traffic indicates you're working with Meadan. I would personally put your 'need for assistance' as likely lower than many of the attendees. > 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. I'm not sure how organizations like OpenGeo, MetaCarta are 'GIS companies', or how by working for one of them, I'm a "GIS insider". > But there's a problem in the open source GIS community. It is being > constantly innovated into by outsiders. Sounds like a good thing to me? > It doesn't seem to innovate outwards. 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. Sure. "New work doens't leverage old expertise" is a common problem in any field: reinventing the wheel is always more fun than buying one from the store. > 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? Because there was no demand? Historically speaking, GIS users -- not ewb users, GIS users -- had no need for tiles. OSM data is still largely useless for GIS analysis. > 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? Why or how is any of this relevant? > 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. Welcome to the real world, where reinventing the wheel is just more fun. > They have their own formats, they seem to emerge full cloth with no > history, they act as if nothing else exists. 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? In what way is OpenLaeyrs, TileCache, FeatureServer, WPServer not a 'crazy new idea'? In what way is the new REST API coming out of ESRI not the embracing of an entirely new culture, moving into the web space that two years ago Jack Dangermond stood on stage and said "ESRI isn't going to compete on the web"? (All that said: In what way is MetaCarta an established player in this field? MetaCarta doesn't work in GIS software; we're an NLP and Search Engine company. The fact that we've helped to enable a lot of the current web-centric Open Source tech is not the result of a MetaCarta mission in this direction thus far, but simply a case of being in the right place at the right time.) > 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'. > > 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. Or perhaps part of the problem is imagining that these people are really the type of audience that a conference like FOSS4G is oriented to? OpenLayers wasn't originally announced at FOSS4G -- nor was Google Maps -- and I don't see that as a bad thing. FOSS4G is not neccesarily about allowing the meeting of the minds for these new and interesting technologies: It's about the spreading of the existing technologies to new markets, it's about the meeting of the people working on them to continue to innovate and extend on the capabilities afforded by them. I don't think that it's any more true that the people holding new ideas could afford to fly to San Francisco, spend $1500 on Where 2.0 entrance fees, and make their idea fly there. Overall, the cost is less than 10% different; $1500 flight + $450 entrance for Boston -> FOSS4G, $400 flight + $1500 entrance fee for Where 2.0. Until you have a sufficiently developed technology that you can really pitch it at a big conference -- or in the case of FOSS4G, that it is sufficiently developed that you can give a workshop on it -- you have to 'pay to play', on O'Reilly's turf or anyone else's. > 1) Sponsorship to reduce costs overall. Certainly ideal, but as pointed out by others, a wish, not something that we can practically enforce. If we had a dozen more big name sponsors, would the cost of the conference be able to go down? Sure. But we can't conjure them out of thin air. > 2) Speakers should be discounted to foster new participation. I don't see any cases where sponsoring speakers would have led to new participation. Can you point to a speaker who isn't established within the geo world who didn't attend because of the cost of entrance? Clearly, you had originally thought that you got in free as a speaker: of all the people who have had to back out of presentations, I did not get a message from any of them other than yourself that the reason was the cost of entry. (Cost of getting there, sure, but there were strong reasons to hold the conference where it was, and I think it was extremely successful at the goals it had by being held in Cape Town.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
