United Kingdom

Mission
The mission of the UK Chapter broadly follows the general OSGeo Mission, with emphasis o n 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
 * To support the development of a fully featured UK SDI
 * To provide a starting point for people from the UK who are new to the Open Source Geospatial movement
 * To raise awareness of the benefits of public access to geodata in the UK
 * To work with OGC members in the UK to promote the implementation and development of open standards for geodata exchange
 * To, maybe, one day, act as focal point for a UK-hosted and organised FOSS4G conference

Mailing List
The UK chapter will soon be starting a temporary mailing list - all are welcome - watch this space.

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
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!

17th March 2007: An Open Geodata session at a one-day event on Open Data covering geodata, civic information and scientific data, organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation; contact Jo to find out more.

Recent Events
 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!


 * 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