Dutch Chapter Report 2014

About the Chapter
The OSGeo Dutch Language Chapter maintains an OSGeo presence within Dutch-speaking countries/areas. Currently it is active within The Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flandres), but has contacts within the Dutch Antilles as well. It organizes at least one annual meeting, the OSGeo.nl Day (see below) plus several other localized events. The Chapter also maintains close ties with the Dutch OpenStreetMap community, organizing joint events such as the annual New Year Party and OSM-tracks on the OSGeo.nl Day. Official OSGeo Local Chapter status was acquired in April 2012. OSGeo.nl (with .nl being the ISO-code for Dutch Language) as the Chapter is known locally, operates from a legal foundation, established in jun 2013. the OSGeo.nl Foundation, whose mission is to promote the adoption and use of Open Geo-ICT in general.

Contact
The OSGeo.nl Foundation, "Stichting OSGeo.nl", via [http:/osgeo.nl www.osgeo.nl] and the board members: Gert-Jan van der Weijden (director) and Just van den Broecke (secretary).

Activity Report 2014

 * Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2014
 * In January we kicked off 2014 with a New Years Drink, aimed at both the Dutch local chapter members, as well as the Dutch OpenStreetMap community. Though we attracted less visitors then last year, it was a good event. It's really turning into a tradition
 * In March we organized two workshops on the "opentopo.nl"-map series (made by Jan-Willem van Aalst). One was held at a café in Hilversum,. attracting 30 attendees mainly from SME's an non-professional GIS-users. The second one took place at the Dutch Cadastre in Zwolle, whic attracted some 30 attendees as well, but this time a more traditional audience (partly from the Dutch Cadastre). This session was videoed and can be watched on YouTube": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-ZRjpKmZc
 * In october 20 participants attended a PostGIS workshop at the GeoFort.
 * In November we held our third annual OSgeo.nl day. For the first time as part of the general Dutch geo-congres "GeoBuzz". We had a separate room, in which a workshop and 10 presentations took place. Our goal was to reach out to a broader audience, not just the usual OSGeo/FOSS4G developers & users. This worked out partly, we attracted some new people who attended one of two of the OSgeo.nl presentations. Maximum attendance almomst 100 people, overall we had some 140 different persons to our presentations.
 * The mailing list "dutch" has about 140 members. The meetup group has about 90 members
 * Contacts with general (non-FOSS4G) dutch geospatial organisation have been established, e.g. the GIN and GeoBusinss
 * 2014 was the first year we had full sponsorship (of 5 SME's)
 * In the summer the old (plan HTML) website has been upgraded to a new Wordpress based website (with Meetup, Git and twitter integration!).

Areas for Improvement

 * Still, too much dependency on too small key members. More active members should be involved.
 * The formerly bi-weekly IRC-meetings have been transformed into a 4-weekly IRC and a 4-weekly board meeting (using Google Hangout). the IRC seem to loose their popularity. That's a point of attention, as we don't want to turn into an organisation where the board is the most important. We have to keep up the community building!

Opportunities to Help

 * any help is welcome, especially financially, organizing events and practial things like maintaining the website