At a recent tech conference hosted by a proprietary software company one of the presenters said “We’re serious about open source, and we use it to build our software“ I guess he thought that this was a virtuous statement of coolness and openness. The speaker then went on to talk about the ways that the company was giving back to the open source community. It prompted me to think about the absorption of open source […]
Open Source
41 posts
Another year passes with a record low of blog posts. My excuse/explanation is that Ed Freyfogle and I have put a lot of time into the Geomob Podcast – over 50 conversations this year including OpenStreetMap, Earth Observation, the Locus Charter, cartography and map based art, marketing, open source, interviewing several book authors, drones, neogeography (remember that?), hobby projects, products and politics – phew that really is a lot isn’t it? In December 2020 we […]
I’ve been thinking about this post for a while now and I finally wanted to write something about gaming freemium. What do I mean by “gaming freemium”? How much effort will you go to in order to avoid paying for something? Most free services place a limit on the usage that you can get for nothing, the clever ones give you enough to make the service really useful and make their money from a small […]
At the end of last year Ed Freyfogle and I started talking about doing a Geomob podcast as a way of sharing Geomob with a bigger audience. Ed had done a couple of podcasts with another friend and had learnt the basics. It seemed like a fun idea, two friends who share a passion for geo chatting each week and interviewing past Geomob speakers. We recorded our first podcast at the end of January and […]
Last week James Milner and his organising committee staged a brilliant FOSS4G UK at the Geovation Hub. For the first time in ages I wasn’t organising a FOSS4G (well I did help with some financial bits and pieces), I wasn’t presenting (except for a lightning talk) so I could just hang out listen to interesting speakers and learn some cool stuff in the workshops. Here is what I enjoyed in roughly chronological order): Day 1 […]
Last week I wrote a post about making a map of the locations of US steel plants and the electoral results in their local communities. I concluded with this brief summary “it’s a first draft and needs a good bit of work, but you can certainly see a pattern – most of the steel plants (and all of the large ones) are in Republican Districts – hardly a big surprise but there you go. I guess […]
A couple of days ago a friend asked me if I could help a friend of his make a map showing the locations of US steel plants against US 115th Congressional Districts (2016). I tweeted out asking my American geogeek friends if they could help me find the data for this map. Within a few hours I had the Congessional District boundaries and the 2016 election results but the steel plant locations were a little […]
Thanks to the enormous efforts of the FOSS4G 2017 organising team the videos of keynotes and presentations are now appearing on their site. There were a couple of technical glitches when I was giving my FAKEMAPS talk in Boston but fortunately the video finally appeared with sound, slides and me. Get your self a cup of coffee, a beer or even a single malt, sit back and hopefully enjoy, it’s worth making the video ‘full […]
This is my last post on the 2018 FOSS4G Travel Grant Programme (but you can look forward to several more about the 2019 TGP). I wanted to share some of the feedback that I have received from the TGP recipients. In case you have forgotten, you can donate to the 2018 TGP now. My name is Mayra Zurbarán, I am from Colombia (not Columbia!) and a PhD Student at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia […]
FOSS4G just gets better and better, perhaps it’s the delight of being on a geobusman’s holiday rather than being the conference chair? I’d been in conversation with Michael Terner and Guido Stein, the co-chairs of FOSS4G 2017, for over a year in my role as a past chair and member of the OSGeo Conference Committee. I know how much passion and effort they and their team put into bringing FOSS4G to Boston, their vision and […]
Sometimes a glitch can work out. I had been worrying how I was going to get through over 60 slides in my FAKEMAPS presentation (plus builds) in 20 minutes, I cut and cut but still thought I might have to do a hard stop somewhere before the spectacular end. Stressful. The FOSS4G team had asked presenters to use their laptops that were hooked up for recording, they suggested PowerPoint format or PDF (no Keynote). […]
I am sitting at FOSS4G with a little smile on my face. We have just handed out the last of ten travel grants to people who would not have been able to have make the trip to Boston without our support. When you meet these people and hear a little more of their stories you know how important it is that we enable more people to experience FOSS4G. This year we crowdfunded over $1,500 to […]