FRUGOS-ians:
On Friday afternoon we hosted a program for over 40 GIS Managers in
downtown Denver. The focus was on web mapping, specifically PostGIS,
GeoServer, and MapServer, with a little bit on the cloud (e.g. Amazon
Web services).
Thanks goes to Bruce Rindahl for highlighting his PostGIS/SVG work and
Randy George (
http://www.cadmaps.com/gisblog/) discussed the
possibilities of combining Amazon Cloud services with geo open source.
Matt Krusemark of DRCOG (Denver Regional Council of Governments),
discussed their pending launch of a web mapping portal for their
members powered by GeoServer. Given their constituencies--city and
county governments--I believe this is a big deal since it will be
excellent exposure of GeoServer to a sector dominated by proprietary
vendors.
Below are some of the organizations attending folks represented--
AMEC
Arapahoe County
BLM
Booz-Allen
CH2M-Hill
City and County of Denver
City of Aurora
City of Boulder
City of Westminster
CO Dept of Agriculture
CO Dept of Transportation
Denver Regional Council of Governments
Denver Water
Idea Integration
Leonard Rice Engineers
NOAA Park County
Sun Microsystems
SWCA
The Piton Foundation
United Power
University of Colorado
USGS
Walsh Environmental
Briefly put, it represents why the Front Range is the premier hub of
GIS in the country with a cross-fertilization of public and private
organizations, big and small, and to judge by their mere presence,
interested in open source, the geo web, etc.
We did some survey work and uncovered a couple of (unsurprising)
points--
1) IT/Sys Admin burdens are a significant impediment. A couple of
folks confessed that just getting access to a web-enabled server to
experiment with geo-web technologies was a supreme hassle. (Of course
most know you can install most packages on the average laptop, but
this wasn't the crowd to start going on about personal Apache web
servers, port 8080, etc....)
2) Folks want training. And more than one respondent mentioned
OpenLayers training specifically.
Hence, what I propose is we work on a Spring program with a focus on
OpenLayers training. I know we have more than a couple of OL gurus on
the list. The idea would be a 2hr program with the first 30 minutes
showing off advanced OL apps (streaming big data AJAX-like, editing
with FeatureServer integration, etc.), then we'd do 90 minutes of
"Getting Started" training.
WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU--
1) If you have OL apps you'd like to show off...get in touch
2) If you have meeting space: think 20-25 people with excellent
wireless bandwidth for everyone...get in touch.
(We've been sniffing around a couple of public library systems that
seem to offer meeting space, if you're in Boulder or the Fort, let us
know what's on offer up there).
Optimally we'd like a program in all of the major Front Range hubs
(C.Springs, Denver, Boulder, Ft. Collins), with a rotating cast of
presenters and instructors. My feeling is once folks gain traction
with the front-end interface, then running back-end services powered
by Open Source becomes more compelling...
Reply to this thread with your thoughts.
Brian