United Kingdom

Mission
The mission of the UK Chapter broadly follows the general OSGeo Mission, with emphasis on the following areas: (please add and edit as you see fit):


 * To provide a forum for discussion and promotion of Open Source Geospatial Software in the UK
 * To help more UK organisations discover the opportunity of open source geospatial tools, and collate business studies of successful transitions
 * To raise awareness of the benefits of public access to geodata in the UK by collating links to sources of legitimate free data

In addition we would like to work towards the following:


 * A fully-featured open access UK SDI
 * Someday hosting the FOSS4G conference in the UK

Links to Case Studies
Please add any appropriate links here


 * City of Munich move to a completely open source software solution (pdf)
 * Interview with CIO of Oxford Archaeology on the move towards open source
 * Not strictly a Case Study, but a useful discussion on the differences between Open Source Business Models in Europe and the US
 * Actuate Annual Open Source Survey 2008 shows open source is entering the business mainstream in both Europe and the US

Publicly Available Geodata
In progress- please contact the mailing list if you have any legitimate free sources of geospatial data that you would like to include

Public Geodata for the UK

Also check the CKAN pages for geodata sources- mainly global but some UK

Mailing List
Discussion list:
 * http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/uk
 * http://lists.openarchaeology.net/mailman/listinfo/osgeo-uk

Meetings and Events
One really useful role of a UK OSGeo chapter would be as a focal point for organising meetings - evening presentation sessions or short seminars with Q and A afterwards.

Upcoming Events
24-25th September 2008: AGI Geocommunity 08. While we have been unable to secure a room for a meetup at this event, we should aim to get as many interested people together, even if it's just for a chat at lunchtime.

29th September - 3rd October 2008: FOSS4G 2008. This is the big international conference for OSGeo. We will be doing a short report at the AGM on the progress we have made with the UK local Chapter. Perhaps people who are attending and would like to meet up with fellow brits could put their names here, or arrange on the mailing list to meet up?

Recent Events
16-17th June 2008: Meetup during the University of Nottingham's Geowebservices workshop. We are looking for people to help promote OSGeo at the event- check out the mailing list for details. See the wiki page here for further details and discussion.

1st May 2008: UK OSGEO meetup after 1Spatial Conference at Radisson Hotel, Stansted. This is your chance to decide what a UK local chapter should do! See the wiki page here to sign up.

8th-10th December 2006: The UK-originated OpenGuides Open Source spatial wiki project is having a pub meetup and "hackfest" in Oxford - http://dev.openguides.org/wiki/OxfordMeetup2006
 * There will be a few OpenStreetMap people at this event too (there's a fair degree of overlap). Crash space is available, and nice pubs will be visited!

 Tuesday September, 26th 2006: Steve Coast of OpenStreetmap fame gave a talk to the BCS entitled Geospatial Open Source Activity. Details at http://geospatial.bcs.org/site/index.php?s=future-events#3

OpenStreetmap also have regular UK mapping parties in different cities

'''Don't forget to sign the Inspire petition -and tell your friends too - you don't have to use geo-data to believe that publically funded work should be public property! http://petition.publicgeodata.org/

People
Sign up here to show interest! Also join the mailing list so we can be in touch directly.


 * User:Chrisputtick- Yes, definitely worth doing
 * User:JoCook - woohoo!
 * User:Leifuss
 * User:Stuarteve - +1
 * User:JoWalsh
 * User:andyt
 * User:Davidjlock
 * User:Simon - Excellent! All for this!!
 * User:Graeme
 * User:SteveW
 * User::andrewlarcombe
 * User:Gagravarr - involved in OpenGuides and OpenStreetMap in the UK
 * User:Mdgreaney
 * User:Mander - New to all this, but it sounds interesting and I'd like to be involved.
 * User:rollo - sign me up!
 * User:SimonAbele
 * User:Borntopedal
 * User:Jcrone
 * User:AntBeck
 * User:Robert Newnham
 * Suchith Anand
 * User:Bill Wilcox
 * User:JonathanGray
 * User:Amarti