Seven of Nine : Resistance is Futile

Do you remember where you were on Feb Four 2006? Yes, I remember well because I was part of the group that met in Chicago to found OSGeo. I was honored to end up as one of the Interim Board of Directors. I also vividly remember how Markus Neteler and me sat in the hotel lobby after the meeting and could both not quite believe what had just happened. It was an intense event and we felt that we had just been at the right place and at the right time to create something new. We had excellent support from folks who went through this process before, most prominently the Apache Foundation. It all started at OSG 2005 with a talk by Dirk Wilhelm van Gulik which I could not listen to because I attended the "business" talk by Autodesk which intrigued me. I felt something was coming up - which not much later turned out to be the MapServer Foundation.

The crowd that was lucky enough to be able to go to Chicago was partly funded by Autodesk. A big thanks for this and all the support that we received form Autodesk over the next years. At that time I chose to pay for travel and hotel on my own to demonstrate independence from Autodesk. But what is independence? It is an illusion because in the end everything is connected. My funding came from my own company CCGIS which later merged into the WhereGroup and became a trendsetter for geospatial Free and Open Source Software adoption in Germany. Thanks for having me.

But to be honest, most of the work done to get the idea of OSGeo form and then the Foundation off the ground depended on the folks around MapServer, the developers, businesses and user community. The founders of MapServer squarely took the bashing of their own community after having started the MapServer Foundation just somewhat too secretly. They deserve our respect for having gone through the whole "What's in a name?" discussion. Jo Walsh's on being in a foundation blog on Mappinghacks sheds some light on the first steps we took and what we did right and where we could have done better. She also was the first and so far only woman on the OSGeo Board of Directors. One of the characteristics about OSGeo and Open Source in general which still bugs me a bit. But we will have many more years to further explore and eventually amend this.

One interesting aspect of OSGeo is how it has grown to truly represent the broadest aspect of Free and Open Source Geospatial software and increasingly also data. I tried to visualize this in a presentation which I recently gave in Hyderabad (download as ODP (2.4MB) or as PDF (1.2MB)) by adding OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a backdrop to all of our software. Don't get me wrong, OSM is a project all of its own and in good standing. They don't need us. But we need them and we are happy to support them wherever we can. Which similarly applies to the REST of the world. "We are still dominated by a male, white class of geeks" says the white, male geek.

So now we have a solid Foundation up and running with more and more projects inside and around OSGeo, referencing and using each other, many capable of using OpenStreetMap and tapping into other data through OGC standards. I am looking forward for many years to come and my only worry right now is that younger folks will eventually perceive us as solidly sclerotic and rather than fighting for new stuff inside OSGeo will go elsewhere in frustration. We should always keep in mind that things change and evolution is a good thing.

Thanks to all of us for making all of this possible!

And never forget to have fun doing IT!