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About OSGeo Europe and INSPIRE

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About OSGeo Europe and INSPIRE
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
keynote because there are, oh, I see you have him here. Oh, you're finished.
Okay, is there an introduction, or I can't just start.
Yes, I know, I know, yeah. Okay, welcome everybody. After a couple of interesting keynotes, I think I have the honor to talk about
OSGEO and INSPIRE. First of all, thank you again, Guimaras, to host our conference. I didn't have the opportunity yet to visit the center, but I will start with this opportunity from this night on
and take some personal pictures of the beautiful city. What I want to talk about is about OSGEO, and because the topic of this conference is remembering how we started,
I want to start with the past, want to talk about the present, and of course I want to think a bit about the future. Actually, I looked up two quotes and from quantum mechanics, we think that past, present, and future,
they all exist together, actually. And another definition says, okay, you have past, present, and future, that's a concept where we know best how the past is. There is a very uncertain present,
and the future, that's the unknown. So, let's start with the easy part, the past, remembering how we started. I think it was all about software development. It was about tribes of developers finding each other.
It was about start to share ideas and know-how and events and I think that is how FOS4G was born. Actually, I took this information from the website and today, after the presentation of Stephen, I think tribes should be better changed by community
because remember, with the community, the identity of the individual is more important than the identity of the group. So, the past, another thing that I got from the website, the conference aims to bring together
the European FOS4G community. It's not an academic, neither a business. It's a community event to support face-to-face meetings and discussions to foster interactions, to share knowledge and passion. That's interesting.
What is it? What is this conference? It's not a business event, it's not an academic event. First question, did we enjoy the conference until no? Who enjoyed the conference until no? Okay, so, we're bringing people together face-to-face.
Jeff McKenna, a past president of this organization, once said, and I think he's right, it's all about the community. So I will zoom a bit into that later in the presentation. And another thing, we should think global and act local
is a saying in the world that is also something very useful for OSGO. But okay, get on with the past, remembering how we started. Well, actually, we start with creating local chapters
because in a global world, we are talking all different languages. And okay, I'm not native speaking English and most of us are not, but by English we can understand each other. But luckily for us, there is a Spanish chapter, a Portuguese chapter, a Dutch chapter.
There are today more than 50 local chapters. We started also with committees to share experience. Some people are better in marketing and others are better in creating a website, doing some tech stuff for helping out the OSGO.
And we started with local Phosphogy conferences. Then years ago, we only had the global conference. Today, almost every week, there is somewhere in the world a Phosphogy conference. And we start with global initiatives, regional initiatives,
and really very small local initiatives which I think are very important. And at last, a lot of fun, a lot of energy, a lot of free question mark. Joachim told me that in Czech Republic,
the beer is free. So I suggest to organize a Phosphogy there. And pizza. Actually, I had one Phosphogy event where the beer was really free. It was four years ago on the conference in Bremen
during the previous world championship. And they had beer for everybody free of charge. Joachim, you want to say something? Sorry? Okay, but yeah, the beer was free, but I didn't. There were too many people to last beers.
What is also very important is, I think, the opportunity to take local initiatives. I think that is something very important in a community like OSGO. And then, two years ago, OSGO celebrates his already thinned anniversary.
We started with new branding, a new style guide, a new website, a new vision and mission. And actually, the slides I'm presenting, I've used the new style guide, which is online, available. And I want to,
I want to, how do you say that? Sorry? Yeah, to help not, but to stimulate everybody to use the new brand,
because it's really a good help to give presentations. But this gives me the opportunity to give the vision and mission of OSGO. Actually, OSGO is a non-for-profit software foundation.
What they do is, well, they provide financial, organizational and legal support. We do also outreach and advocacy. So we promote global adoption of open source geospatial technology. And what is, in my opinion, the most important item of OSGO?
It's a volunteer-driven organization. That means that all the members of OSGO are individuals and are volunteer individuals. Of course, in our professional life, we belong to other parts in society, like an academic researcher or a business person
or from a government. But in essence, in OSGO, we are all individuals. And that makes the organization strong. And this brings me to the present. And okay, the present, that's today,
that's this evening. I think it's some time to do some exercise. I remember from the keynote this morning, he did some exercise. So we will do also some exercise. I have some questions. Yesterday morning, I asked, who was new?
For who is this Phospho-G conference, the first conference? Can you raise your hand, please? Okay, so a lot of people, so I think almost 50% of the people attending here are, for the first time, coming to Phospho-G conference.
A question to this group. When I go to other Phospho-G conferences afterwards, people say, wow, this was an interesting event. People are talking, giving presentations, which were very interesting, I learned a lot. Was this the case? Did you enjoy, I asked already, but from those people,
did you enjoy this conference? Not everybody, okay, then we have a problem. Or you are tired. So the question is, who are we? Who are we today? Well, are we a group of developers?
Who from here in this conference is a developer? Can you stand up, please? Who is developing software? Okay, almost 50%.
Who is not a developer? Can you stand up, please? Now I have to see everybody moving, otherwise you are asleep. Okay, there are still some people that didn't move. Are you a group of professors or academia? Who is from academical world?
Please raise your hand. That's not so much, I thought we were a bit more from academia in this conference. But okay, who are the self deployed or the consultants in this room? Raise your hand, please. Okay, so who have friends here in this room?
Okay, good. Who are the students of this community? Who is still studying? So this is a missing part, there are no students here. In other Phosphogy conferences there are students,
so we should think about that to invite them also. Who is working for a non-for-profit organization, an NGO, a research institute? Please raise your hand. Okay, I think 30%. Good, that was the exercise.
So actually what I want to say is this is only one of the Phosphogy conferences. If you imagine there are almost every week a Phosphogy conference somewhere in the world. OSGEO after 12 years has grown in a large network organization.
And there are today more than 50 local chapters. We create local chapters today on a more political level. So we created last year OSGEO Europe. I think a couple of months ago OSGEO North America was created. I think there was another one created a couple of weeks ago
and I think there will be more to come. OSGEO is active in several partner organizations, OGC. Who doesn't know OGC from this room? Everybody knows OGC, the Open Standard Organization. We are active in several organizations like the UN.
We set up partnerships and there are new challenges that appear like the code of conduct. So the question is what binds us together? We are a very, very diverse group.
Actually, I think the only thing that binds us together that is open source software for geo and location. And as in the keynote of yesterday evening, Stephen told us this is from several perspectives.
I can mention a couple of them. Some of us, we had to prove are developers. Others are, I forgot the group, the users. Very important. The students, the professors and so on and so on. OSGEO is a community that is willing to promote
open source software from different perspectives. What is in for us? And this brings us to the one candle. OSGEO Europe is within three days exactly one year old. And so I want to invite everybody to the OSGEO Europe General Assembly.
It's not in this room. It's at 6.30 and it will be in the Palazzio just outside here where we will have a meeting about the activities we did the first year and how we want to progress next year.
But let me start to tell you about a challenge. When I came back from the Phosphogee Conference in Belgium there was a guy from a municipality. I actually was responsible for 30 municipalities and it was also his first time
he came to a Phosphogee event. And he asked me, this was really interesting, I had a lot of energy, can you come? I will organize an event for more than 20 municipalities. They will all come, all the GIS responsibility. Can you come and give a workshop?
Because we want to know a bit more about open source. So I went there and I told him about OSGEO. I told him about OSGEO Live, about the different projects. When do you want to use which project? And I came to a couple of strange conclusions.
The people I'm talking to didn't know about open source. It was for them the first time, they were amazed if they saw the OSGEO Live environment with all the solutions. They didn't understand when they had to use open layers
or GeoServer or whatever of the more than 50 projects on OSGEO Live environment. One thing in that area, in Belgium, they understood. They knew what QGIS was and they were users of QGIS.
Most of them knew about QGIS, which was good because before they were using other propriety software. So I started to explain them when to choose which project and after the second workshop, they asked me, oh, can you do more? And I told them, I don't want to do more
because in the room there were very small people and people were already, there was one community knowing about GeoServer and doing some things and another doing something with open layers and another doing something with R. So I told them, okay, the next event that you organize,
please present yourself and organize yourself. So I went to the workshop and they did it. And then I invited them to the next FOS4G conference and say, okay, please join us. And that is also a message here because there are a lot of Portuguese members here.
If you organize the next FOS4G conference, please invite other people coming to the FOS4G conference. Organize a call for papers and present and share information with each other. I think this is the real core of OOS Geo.
Another thing that was remarkable, that is they didn't only knew the software, they had very simple problems and they couldn't manage these problems, although these were GIS professionals.
For instance, they have a data set and they want to publish it on the web. This was a problem, a major problem. I think most of the people in the room can solve that. They were asking themselves, how can we solve that? The question is, how can we as a community help them?
Do we want to help them? Well, in the original spirit of the developer communities, we started to help them out. So in the spirit of if I put my time in something because I can help it, maybe somebody else will help me
when I need some help and this works. This is how community is working. The question is, how do we scale that in the future? How do we reach other people? How can we support this? Well, yesterday there was a B2B mix in the youth hotel
and there were some presentations and one of the presentations were very interesting. Open Geo Labs, which is an initiative of a couple of persons out of the community, organize themselves to give workshops,
to teach and to bring that material online, all open, but they also organize these workshops and they try to help people and they have to pay them for that, which is normal, but I think that's a good start. And I know there are also other initiatives. I can name another presentation yesterday
was Geomatico in Spain, I think, and also, for instance, the Open Geo Group in the Netherlands. And I'm sure there are many, many more initiatives. So if you know about an initiative,
please come and tell it to me. And even better, we will put it on the website of OS Geo Europe so that we can help people to learn about open source and how to spread the word. Another thing from the last couple
of Phosphogee conferences in Europe were the topic talks. Topic talks are the events where we can, as a community, take a specific topic that has not immediately something to do with a specific project,
but this cross project, and has to do about what the community should do, how we should evolve. I think we should reintroduce these topic talks in the next Phosphogee conferences. And these are just a couple of small examples,
but I think what which is more important, as an organization, as a community in Europe, we have to look for opportunities. And I think there are big opportunities. For instance, if you see this picture, this is a picture of, I know I borrowed
a couple of slides from, in this case, from GRC, the Joint Research Center. And it's part of a presentation about inspiring. This is a picture of power plugs worldwide.
And the power plugs that are with the circle around them are the European ones. And if you look at it, it's a mess. So that's the reason we need standards. And that's also the reason we need standards and harmonization about data.
And that's why we need an SDI, a harmonized data set. And I think Europe is working on this already for more than 15 years, 20 years. But this is a huge project.
They're not advancing very fast, but they are advancing. And there is a huge number of data providers and they are all working on it. And there is also legislation. For instance, today, for the metadata,
there are more than 10,000 services. For the download services and the viewable downloads, every part of what has to be delivered and inspired is growing. And this is from the governmental point of view. This data should also be used in all day life.
And I think there is a big opportunity. And what we can do with OSU is to try to go for that opportunity and to look how we can improve our services and our software and our projects so that we can help this community providing this data
and this harmonization. So if we type in OSU on the, if we type in inspire on the OSU website and we create a word diagram out of it, well, then you see already a couple of matches
and a couple of terms very close to OSU. So one of the things that we took as initiative with OSU Europe is one of the major, in my eyes, the major products of OSU. And yesterday I met the spiritual father of that product,
which is OSU Life, which came into life, I think, more than, no, about 10 years ago. What we did was we tried to create a flavor
of OSU Life for Inspiree. So we address the European ecosystem, the data providers, the people who are involved with Inspiree, we tell them about OSU Life, and we also try to address the different projects of OSU.
And in the next OSU Life, which is now emerging, we ask to create specific use cases and data sets and ways how to solve Inspiree solutions. And I think if we do that on a consistent way,
that could help. In that way, more and more OSU software would be used, and I think it's on the OSU industry to provide services so that there exists single points of contacts to deliver services for the people needing them. So I think OSU can there become a OSU Life as a product,
can become a bridge between OSU and the Inspiree community. I think that's very important. Okay, coming back to what binds us together.
Well, I think that Phosphogee should be fun and should give energy. And when I go to a Phosphogee conference, I always return with a lot of ideas and with a lot of energy. So this is a photo from the Phosphogee conference in Como.
And as here, it is a community of several stakeholders, several perspectives. So Phosphogee is actually a conference that is with the audience of people already knowing OSU,
already knowing open source. What we should do, and we took an initiative for that also, and we should go outside. If you think about the whole spectrum, I think less than 1% are people knowing
about open source software. Can be amazing if you are here in this conference where everybody knows that, but in fact, a lot of people doesn't care and doesn't know. So what I want to do, and this is a draft diagram of an ID, which I tried to realize,
is from the OSU perspective, creating the OSU ecosystem. And you see several icons, and there are icons for academic, there are an icon for government, there is an icon for the industry. And the academic, they have the students to reach out to,
and we have Geo4All, which does that. And the government has a lot of users that they have to reach out to. And then the industry can provide services. And actually, for the Inspire Conference,
which is this year in Belgium, I tried to find a couple of specific parties that could fill in the specific icons. So I reached out to the University of Leuven, and they are willing to stand on a boot of OSGEO.
And I went out to the region of Flanders, and they also will be on the same boot. And then I sent a message in the European discuss list, and I got some reactions from GeoSolutions, from GeoSpark, from Latlon, from Grid,
and they all are going to be on that boot. And actually, I can show you a design about how the boot should look like. So this was my own draft, this is by designer, and you can see the ecosystem of OSGEO
in a sort of marketplace, in the middle you have a marketplace with all the individuals, the OSGEO members and the people and the citizens working together as one ecosystem based on open standards, open data, open software, and then get involved,
collaborate, present Geo4ALL, doing research together, using European programs, and so on. This is just a draft, but the idea is if that action of OSGEO is successful, I want to use it throughout Europe
and ask for universities where we have events and regions and administrations and companies who want to join to promote OSGEO. The story is that every partner on the boot has to tell why he is involved in OSGEO.
Then he can promote his own service or what he does for the students or how he's using open source software for his administration. What we still need is a website.
So there is an OSGEO website, and for OSGEO Europe the only thing we have is a wiki, which we can use for internal communication. That's wiki.osgeo.slasheurope. So I want to invite everybody who has time
on the Code Sprint Friday to start working on a branch of the OSGEO website which will handle the specific European local chapter. So talking about Friday, this brings us to the future.
What binds us together from the several initiatives? Well, actually, open source software for geolocation. Now, I think there are a lot of developers,
but I'm not sure if we all know or are aware what is free and open source software. And as there are a lot of new people in this room, I think it's necessary that we also bring that message. Free as in free beer?
Not really, it's more free as in freedom of speech. In Spanish it's better, it's libre. So I will repeat why open source software is important. First of all, we should have the freedom
to run software as we wish. And we should have the freedom to study the software and to change it and to use it to our own needs. Therefore access is necessary. And we need the freedom to redistribute the software and the copies so that we can help others.
And we should also have the freedom to modify the versions and distribute the software. And on this way we give the chance to the whole community to benefit of our own changes.
Access to the source code is important for that. And actually this is what OSGEO is doing. OSGEO is a software foundation and we are responsible for supporting our great and collection of projects. Today there are I think between 20 and 30 OSGEO projects.
Incubated projects. And I do want to ask if there are new initiatives and new projects, please reach out to OSGEO and we will with a lot of pleasure look at your software. OSGEO supports the projects on a legal manner,
on a technical manner. There are a lot of very good software developers with a lot of experience in open source software. And we are very professional in going and handling open source software. But what is software? That is a strange, silly question
on a developer conference. Well actually, I needed this slide because I wanted to introduce at least one slide for Maria, the president of this. So software is eating the world. And actually it depends,
and this is my cat in my presentation. Actually, depending on how you view the world, you model the world, you use software as a language to talk to machines. And today, software is used for machines
to talk to each other. And actually, the fuel of software is data. And the data is provided by sensors. And we are a very important sensor in this storage. And I think that we should be aware about that,
how important software is, and how important it is to keep software open. Because not long ago, in GIS, it was all about paper maps and digitizing and simple things. But today, we have an abundance of data.
We have devices, we have satellites, sentinels, we have cars moving around. We have every car as a driver, smart cars talking to each other. We have the internet of things. We have the human beings acting as sensors. The question is, how are we as a community
going to cope with that? Because there are big companies, very smart in gathering all that data, and gathering all that software, and doing very good things with it. But is it a world where one company owns everything? Is that the world that we want to go on?
If not, I think we should act so that we can get our own software, our own data, and so on. Machine-to-machine communication. Big data challenge. Actually, every second, there are pentabytes on data generated.
I think also, it's our responsibility with our community to do some things with that, to make that data available, to use that data for useful purposes, and don't rely on one company or two companies
who are providing all these nice services for us. I think we all know what big data is. Big data is not a lot of data. It's a lot of data which changes fast, and which has a big velocity. And there is an evolution.
As a software programmer, a couple of years ago, software alone was, we could do a lot with software alone today. Actually, 30 years ago, hardware was unique,
and software was used to help the hardware manipulating. Afterwards, hardware became a commodity. Today, software is becoming a commodity, and we are creating microservices. Integration becomes a new challenge. Software becomes relevant
for almost everything we do in the world. Actually, our lives depend on software. Like a statement, it's the software, stupid. Instead of, it's the economy, stupid. We need to make, I think that it's so important
that we should try to migrate all software to open source software. And license, in that case, become more and more important. So I think the previous keynote was right in saying that we should take care about attribution, about licenses, about sharing the data and the software.
And then the question is, okay, what do we do? What should the future be? And there are a couple of nice, hyping words, like deep learning, get connected in IoT.
And I think a lot of projects are doing that. But what is our vision? How are we going to create a vision around that? How can we take the lead in the software development roadmap? And with we, I don't only mean OSGEO. I think OSGEO should partner with other open communities so that we can take the lead
in this important matter. And of course, as president of OSGEO Europe, I think what should we do with the software industry, and more specifically with the European software industry? How do we want to organize that?
How can we learn to collaborate? So, saying that, I come to the end of my presentation. What is a community? Well, a community is something, a group of people living together.
And I think we are all connected through the internet. So we are living together on the internet. And we have a common interest. And it's also an ecological thing. We are dependent on each other. I think that is very important. What is also important is the network. It's all about the network.
And I think Phos4G conferences are the perfect way to network, to get to connect to each other face to face. So if you are convinced and you want to become better involved with OSGEO and you want to come to next Phos4G conference,
what can you do? Well, the first thing is become part of the OSGEO family. Very simple, start reading the mailing lists. Start replying to the mailing lists. Start contributing or go, what you did already, go to a conference, a Phos4G conference.
And next step is go to a code sprint. There you, people will ask you, can you do that? And everybody can do some things. And the next code sprint, okay, that's an old slide, is now Friday and Saturday here on this conference. You can become a member of OSGEO.
First of all, you don't have to be a member to get involved. We are an inclusive organization. But what is important is the membership is free. You can only become a member as an individual, as a person.
It's free and it's easy. It's just registering on the website. So if this is your first Phos4G conference and you liked the atmosphere and you want to know more, well, you can start with trying out the software.
You can start with doing everything I said. And then depending on who you are, if you are a developer, you can go to a code sprint, you can contribute to projects. But if you are a user, you can also go to a code sprint. But you can also contribute to projects.
You can also write documentation. You can write testimonials or user experience or explain why you changed to open source software. And don't go through the whole list, but if you are a manager, an entrepreneur, the presentation will be online. Everybody can do some things. If you are from government, if you are from academia,
if you are a researcher, just to give you an idea, this is a big community. We have more, this is a one-year-old slide. I think we have more than 30,000 unique subscribers. We have more than 290 mailing lists.
And this gives an idea about how the mailing lists are spread. So they are well-read by a lot of people. So we have an active community. We are also well-organized. We have a board. This is a board of two years ago. We have nine board members.
We have, from the board, we have contact with officers from the several committees and projects. We have foundation projects. We have local chapters. We have charter members. We have members. Everything is indicated on the website.
What do we want to do in the future? Just one more thing. The future actually was the most uncertain part of my presentation. But the future is what we want. It's what you want.
OSU is a duocracy, which means everybody can take initiatives. And positive initiatives will be followed by others. So I think we should become more organized in Europe. And if we want to do this, we will need help. We will need volunteers to help.
So the future is you. And you can get involved very easily because the next OSU meeting starts, not in this room, but in the Palacio within three quarter of an hour. Thank you for your attention.
Any questions, remarks, comments? Yes. Hi. I just, I liked your presentation
because I think it covers a lot of things that we haven't covered in the presentations. I just wanted to remark that it's true that this meeting we have now is going to work as assembly of the European chapter. But don't think that we are going to talk only about the European chapter. This is a general OSU member meeting.
So even if you have something to discuss that is not specifically related to Europe, this can be also discussed. And I want to encourage all of you to come to the meeting because I think it's important that you can,
it's one of the best ways to have, to know what you think we should do in OSU and maybe to participate. We have a lot of things that everyone can do. You don't need to be an expert. And just wanted to invite you to come. Don't leave, don't run away. So actually, Maria's right.
There's only one OSU, but we are organized in several local chapters because that's more easy to organize ourselves. But OSU is just one big family over boundaries and over globally. Other remarks or questions?
No? No questions? For the new people, you don't want to ask something about OSU? Okay, then I think we can close this session.
Thank you. There is a question? I need some time to think about my question. I've seen you telling that OSU Europe is one year old now. Can you just give a couple of sentences
what happened in this year with? Yes, I had the intention to do that in the other meeting, but no problem. No, no, I will do that. I think it's important. Thank you for your question. Actually, I introduced already the couple of things we did in the presentation. I will repeat them.
One of the things we did was the initiative of OSU Life. So we organized in the Bond Code Sprint and we invited people from the GRC and data providers to come to the Bond Code Sprint. I introduced them with people from the projects
and we tried to start the first drafts of OSU Life, the new release. We started with an initiative to outreach, not to Phosphogy, but to other conferences.
So the example I showed is the first example that we are working out now with a couple of people who were interested and reacted on the mail. So if that is a successful event, I will report back on that so we can discuss
and I'll try to recuperate the marketing material so that we can reuse it with partners who are interested. So if you think about conferences in your domain, where you think there we should be as a company or as an administration or as a government,
please contact me. I'll try to create a group, an ecosystem. I think it's important that if we outreach as OSU, we do it together as individuals belonging to different, what I call icons in the ecosystem. And then everybody can tell his story and be there on the prisons.
The principle is very simple. We do cost sharing very transparently. Every party pays the same amount and I try to make the budget correct. And I think it's a very good way to outreach to the 99% of people not knowing open source
and giving the opportunity to get to know us. Are there other things? Yes, we had a couple of, I tried to set up a couple of meetings but there was not so much response. I have the opinion that on events like this,
it's much in the code sprint and it's much more easy to discuss what we should do. We are not so operational online. And I think that is also a point I want to address in the next meeting. We should learn to do that because I think we need more.
There are a lot of people interested but we need also IDs and people wanting to do the IDs just like in the software community. Other, is this, gives this an ID?
And what we need is a website. I think we have some work to do there. Yes, yes, no it's, it answers it. I've seen the slides where you were talking about virtual life and that I was kind of thinking because I sometimes lose pieces in the mailing list
but I've lost the getting born of all this and I think it's an extremely important thing. So I was wondering how this is moving on. Well another thing actually that cost me a lot of time is well we set up an account,
we set up the organization, the legal system. So I had 22 signatures all over Europe and outside of Europe it took almost six months to process that on a legal way because from every individual for I think for security reasons they want to know
because you belong to a legal organization you want to know who you are. We have an account which was easy. I tried, we have now a grass account also. One of the problems there is that if somebody from the Czech Republic wants to have the way to use that account he has to put his signature
physically to a bank which is terrible. So luckily we have a community where there are also people from in the neighborhood who could set their signature and in that way we could solve that. But there are a lot of things to solve in a European context.
We are not yet one big economical area. That's for sure. Okay. Other questions, remarks?
Yeah. Yeah, thanks Dick for very nice presentation. I was thinking a while if this is real topic or just like my impression.
I have a feeling still that it's very nice when we are encouraging new people to join free software, join all those activities. But by just my personal experience it looks like that what you presented start reading mailing list,
start contributing this way, that way. It looks like a lot of work which can be attractive when you are young and you have free time and whatever. And that comes to my experience that I've seen a lot of people with huge talent
and lost after that first period of time when they tried to do something and they were quite successful. Then they started to ask those questions like how I'm going to earn the money
and I'm just like spending a lot of time on things which are not giving any money to me and I can't eat that software. So I have a feeling that there is a very big or like some significant gap or some help needed if we want to attract newcomers.
I would say I've seen at least one dozen of people which just like stopped doing anything because any attempt led anywhere. So thanks. Thank you for your remark. I think it's very important.
I want to tell something I observed during this year. So we are an NGO now, non-for-profit organization without, only with volunteers, without any paid people on board. And as you say, there are a lot of very experienced people.
One of the things, another thing we tried to do is for instance there are people here who are maintaining code that is used by people from ESA. There's no way to get a subscription or a support contract
and to pay these developers and these developers are people from our community. When I looked around just in Belgium, there is also a non-for-profit organization which called Agoria and Agoria is an organization that represents the industry, a bit like LocationTech.
Don't want to use the word too much but they are representing the industry. Now what is remarkable is that they have, Belgium is a small country, only 10 million people. So it's an NGO and they have 250 paid experts.
Just for a part, it's only the make industry and that are only the experts and then they have a whole other organization. And okay, there is the industry that pays a membership.
I believe that OSU, one of the things that is very important in OSU, that's an individual organization. So I think that is very important. But to think on that, it's not Belgium, it's Europe. We are, I think if we count all the experts
in OSU together in Europe, I think in that model and you extrapolate it, we could all be paid by the industry, the software industry in Europe and we can act as an organization to help software industry in Europe. Just an idea. Maybe we should discuss that later
but that is what we are talking about. We are trying to do it all voluntary. So I follow you but I find it very important because we are doing things voluntarily. This gives an amazing energy and this gives opportunities that you don't have in another situation.
So I think it's good that industry is sponsoring OSU. It's good that we have users and I think we should try to use the success of OSU to become smarter and to create the next way
of people collaborating. But I think money can't be an issue. We should find a problem for money. That should be no issue. About young people which are just like growing now,
newcomers, I understand that once you pass some level of maturity, then maybe you have opposite problem that you don't know which, like you have a lot of work and a lot of paid work and you can live very well but if we want to attract other people,
young people now which probably one year ago they didn't even know that something like free software exist and they learn something in their school. What I was saying is that a lot of those very skilled people are somewhere lost on a track
and they would rather sign with some company and they would develop some Java stuff proprietary for Oracle, that's money secure. They will give them three weeks of leave and other benefits and that's, we will...
And I think that we have the tools to avoid that, we have GEO4ALL to convince these young people from the university, starting their career, to getting to know the software, and then I think OSGEO should help also in getting more
money injected in that OSGEO ecosystem, in the open source ecosystem, and if it is possible to get more money injected in the open source ecosystem, more young people will find challenges to do a job in that ecosystem. So I think we should think how we can promote that and how
we can work on that. But I think it's a very important issue. I agree.
Just to remind people that OSGEO does have a jobs list. One of our mailing lists is for job adverts and for job requests, so if you've got jobs going in your organisation, send them out. Just the volume of messages on that list is not very high at
the moment, and it probably should be higher. I know a lot of open source companies that are hiring that aren't using that mailing list, and I think if we all actually make an effort to post things to that list, more people will think, oh, I could actually make a living doing this. I'll send you the address.
If you're worried if open source is going to give less money to business than closed proprietary licence, the thing is open source has the same potential in business as proprietary licence, and even more because
the more companies and more people working with open source and spreading it and the more volume of users there are, and the more use cases we cover, then more money is there. So why move to proprietary licence? I think there is a lot of potential here if you want
to look from that perspective. That will be another full round table or talk or something.
Hi. Thank you for a nice presentation, Kirk. As we talked on lunch the other day, you mentioned on your sketch the stack item, you mentioned education and you mentioned also government.
Okay. I think Osteo should think about government initiatives. There is Osteo4All for education. Is there anything for government? I don't know about it.
Talking about money, I think it's interesting to think about other initiatives. Free Software Foundation Europe has an ongoing initiative. It's very important. We should talk here. Public money, public software.
It's a source of money that should be mentioned and think about it because it's a huge base for sustainability of the free software initiative. Thank you for giving me the opportunity
and I mentioned it a bit. There is always open source. The last 30 years was successful and then other industry competed open source again. If you think at Esri 10 years ago,
it's thanks to the actions in open source that Esri improved his software because should open source not be there, Esri should be not so good as they are today. I think that's a positive statement.
Yesterday in the talk, you mentioned that Autodesk and Esri are now joining forces, BIM and JS. Another initiative, for instance, Google with Google Maps and Google Navigation has a very good way
to reach out to communities and to ask people to help them to improve the data. This was exactly what OpenStreetMap was doing. The problem is or the fact is that Google closes down his quality data and just serves people
and it's a single company initiative. I think what we can or what we should change and why OSU is important is because it's not a single entity organization. We are a community. We are part of society and I think software but also data is so important
and will become very important in the future that we should think about how can we become the owner again of our own services, our own data, our own software and there I think we should play a small role as OSU and then I think we should create partnerships
with other open organizations to create and to collaborate and create a stronger initiative. But I think we should act and it goes very fast. In the past, open source always went back and was very competitive. I believe that also today we are with so many good people
with all these positive elements. Together I think we can beat and go for an open society.
Okay. So we close down this session and within 20 minutes we have the meeting in Palacio. In Palacio, nearby. So this practical stuff, the Palacio is the building nearby, the old building next to this building. Also we have the gala dinner for the ones who subscribe.
It's a restaurant called Historico. We already update the website with the link so we can find the location. And tomorrow we have the closing session at 5 and at 5.30 we have a party.
We have the 10th anniversary of the Portuguese OSU chapter and some of us like me, Miguel, Danilo, Ricardo, Ricardo and so on. We are still alive so we need to celebrate the 10th anniversary while we are still alive.
So after the closing session we'll have a party. You are free to come as in free speech, to drink free beer as in free beer. So thank you very much.