California Chapter Report 2009

California Chapter

 * Contact name: Alex Mandel (Davis, CA),                      Landon Blake (Stockton, CA),                       Ragi Burhum (San Francisco, CA)

Key Accomplishments

 * 1st Meeting
 * Marketing and Events
 * Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, Las Vegas
 * OSCON Open Source Convention, San Jose
 * Where 2.0, San Jose
 * GIS Day, UC Berkeley, UC Davis
 * North American Cartographic Information Society, Sacramento
 * Several presentations at local chapters and unconferences
 * WebMapSocial Silicon Valley Meetup Group: OSGeo and PostGIS presentation (Google in Mountain View)
 * Cloudcamp: OSGeo in the Cloud (Silicon Valley)
 * Augmented Reality Dev Camp: OSGeo and PostGIS presentation (Hacker Dojo in Mountain View)
 * Bay Area ArcGIS User Group: Open Source GIS - OSGeo and PostGIS (Berkeley)

Areas for Improvement

 * As a very large area geographically we are encouraging more local interaction via unofficial subchapters.
 * There is a Bay Area sub chapter that hosts social meetups. http://baugos.com/
 * While we have a strong presence in Northern California it would be great to bring together more people in the Los Angeles and San Diego regions.

Opportunities to Help

 * Always looking for more events to go to.
 * Looking for help designing and administering award to government agencies in California that promote free and open access to geospatial data.
 * Looking for programmers to assist with software development projects hosted by Chapter.

Outlook for 2010
The growth of mobile platforms like Android and iPhone has also caused a huge increase for the need of geospatial libraries and server technologies. Since the Bay Area has huge activity of startups with very talented people with low cash flow, it is a perfect incubator for adoption of OSGeo technologies. Several of the current startup companies that are doing anything related to geo have started using software like PostGIS.

Interestingly enough, Unconferences and local meetup groups have proven to be very effective at producing follow up e-mails with questions about Open Source GIS technologies. In fact, for these type of events, it is not uncommon to present to a group of 10-80 developers who are all interested and flabbergasted that they did not know that such open source technologies even existed. Since the mobile application market keeps growing, it is unquestionable that OSGeo adoption in the Bay Area will follow suit.