We’re intentionally bringing together folks who may otherwise not work together. “I don’t have any experience with GIS data or programming”, you say?  No problem! We’ll provide a ready-made list of tools and data sources for you to use.  Or, bring some of your own data to work with.  It’s a short event, no fancy or polished results expected.

When: Friday, May 18th, 2012 from Noon to 5pm
Where: CoCo Co-Working and Collaborative Space, 3rd Floor, St. Paul Lowertown
Food: Yes!
Cost: Free!

DEADLINE EXTENDED REGISTER NOW! Registration by April 19th, 2012.

A social gathering at a nearby establishment will follow the event.

The size and number of teams  are limited, so register quickly if you are interested!  (Spaces will be allocated based on time of registration, but there will be some moderation to ensure participation from both communities and a balance within teams.)

Thanks to sponsors CoCo and Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium for their support.

Questions:        paul @ flatrockgeo.com          david.fawcett @ gmail.com

When the city called upon us to help assess and map the damage, we choose to deploy a mobile GIS using Trimble GPS devices running ArcPad.  The information gleaned from the field study was instrumental in Fridley getting Federal Disaster Status.

Read the complete story at the Fridley Patch.

So why the change?  Northstar Geographics and GIS Rangers have been tossing each other work for the last couple of years.  As we worked more and more closely, it became apparent that both companies were in essence, supporting the same set of clients and had the same goals for the future.  It was our meeting at the FOSS4G conference last fall that really got us talking about bringing things together under a single roof.

A major focus for us in 2012 will be the continued development of our MapFeeder environment into a bone-fide software service.  Keep an eye on our Twitter stream for more announcements in the coming months!

Over the years Tait Danielson Castillo, executive director of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association has used many student interns to create simple maps for the neighborhood using ESRI desktop software.  However, as is often the case there was no continuity from student to student.  Each new student required new training and a great deal of knowledge was lost each time a student left.

Realizing their need for some professional GIS help, Tait hired Flat Rock Geographics to assess their existing GIS and to develop a new sustainable model.  The result was a clean, concise structure and procedures for map templates, mobile data collection and an easy to use GeoMoose mapping tool.

Flat Rock Geographics is continuing to enhance these mapping and database tools, which we hope will serve as a model for other neighborhood groups to implement.

Read the complete Star Tribute article.

I contend that waiting a few weeks, letting ideas and thoughts distill and take shape, produces a better summary than the flurry of blog posts written immediately following the conference. I have the advantage of harvesting more of the links and videos as they make their way to the web. It’s also nostalgic now; remembering together the “good ole days in Denver”.

This year was the largest FOSS4G conference to date, with over 900 attendees from 42 different countries. If you just now happened to hear about FOSS4G 2011 Conference and OSGeo yesterday, this post is as fresh as the ones posted the day after the conference ended.

Some highlights…

Paul Ramsey’s keynote Why do you do that? An exploration of open source business models about open source business models was excellent and set a great tone to be looking at open source GIS software for the week. Paul founded the PostGIS spatial database in 2001, remains an active developer and is on the steering committee. He is a geospatial architect for OSGeo and is also the clever elephant for the Clever Elephant consultancy.

He started out telling us that that, “as a practitioner of the absurd I’ve been asked to come and talk about ‘open source business models’.” How can you have a business model built on giving software away? He goes on to explain open source as a way of combining software development and distribution with a licensing tactic. He provides good examples of strategies for extracting value from open source.

He gives Google as an example of a company extracting considerable value from the open source system. They would not have been able to ramp up their business as they did without Linux and Apache deployed on their miles and miles of generic boxes. Google’s model was simple: organize the world’s information and then paste little ads all around it. They do it very, very well. They also contribute code back to the wild and improve on current open source projects.

Imagining an Internet without open source, according to Paul, is to see an Internet run by Microsoft, IBM and Sun. Ack!

The final moral of his whole story is that you need to figure out what your open source biz model is and how best to add value via open source.

There were many, many great presentations, which really left my head spinning! However, the one that got me really excited to test my map design skills was Turning Data into Beautiful Maps; in which Tom MacWright gave a wonderful demo of Tilemill and how easy it is to style maps with Carto, a CSS-like language. The TileMill workspace lets you edit the Carto text file and see immediate feedback. TileMill outputs to a format called MBTiles and this format is becoming another standard in the FOSSGIS world. You can pay for hosting via the Mapbox site or you can install your own MBTile-compatible server and host it yourself.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. TileMill is brought to you by the the wonderful folks at Development Seed.

For an introduction to the OSGeo universe, watch Arnulf Christi’s plenary presentation The State of OSGeo. In addition to all the things OSGeo does to support open source, you will get to see a bunch of historical t-shirts from various conferences of the past.

Arnulf Christi: The State of OSGeo

From Brian Timoney’s talk (no clear title):

Our proprietary software problem is also part and parcel of an IT problem because the outrage is not only that these services do not provide nearly the value we spend on them, the outrage is that in our industry, there is no outrage. Our expectations are so low we shrug and just assume that’s the way it is. If that’s not the definition of vendor capture, I don’t know what is.

He provided excellent examples.

If you’re in the government sector and are considering using open source and opening up your data, watch Peter Ter Haar’s talk called Open Season: Open Standards, Open Source and Open Data in Ordnance Survey.

Peter Ter Haar: Open Season: Open Standards, Open Source and Open Data in Ordnance Survey

More

Peter Batty’s Vimeo account has high quality video of some of the talks. Many more talks are at the FOSSLC site and I think more will be coming.

The OpenGeo site has reports and links from FOSS4G including a daily “diary” by Paul Ramsey.

RMB Environmental Laboratories (RMB) in Detroit Lakes, MN, works with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to provide free water quality reports on many lakes throughout the state.  Along with a laboratory analysis of each lake’s amount of phosphorus and chlorophyll-a, other observations such as water clarity, water levels, rainfall amounts and recreational suitability are also documented.

Screen image of interactive map component - click to enlarge

The original reporting interface, developed several years ago, was based on outdated Microsoft web technology and had began to show it’s age. In 2010 RMB asked Flat Rock Geographics for a fresh approach to the reporting tools—one which would also include an interactive mapping component.  Building on our existing MapFeeder framework, Flat Rock created the new RMB application with proven open source tools; MapServer, OpenLayers, PostGIS, the CodeIgniter PHP framework and the jQuery JavaScript framework.

Unlike many “general purpose” web mapping tools where the “map is the app”, the MapFeeder framework employs the map and geographic analysis routines in an innovative way; as part of the overall application solution. MapFeeder has also been applied to a variety of other data-driven applications.

You can test-drive the system yourself at our hosting site and you can find out more about RMB Environmental Laboratories. For more details on water quality monitoring, check out Moriya Rufer’s excellent series of articles at the RMB site.

No booth this year but Paul will be at the workshops and the full conference. Tweet him at @northstargis if you want to talk GIS, location intelligence, or about his mapFeeder and Geocruncher projects.

Flat Rock Geographics Principal Consultant, Paul Wickman will be teaching a workshop on using GeoNetwork Open Source for for managing geospatial metadata.