OpenTechnologyConference Mar2007

Open Technology Development - Realizing the Vision

We are currently working with the Associate for Enterprise Integration (AFEI) to organize a two day conference in Washington DC, 14, 15 March at the Hyatt at Crystal City. The 14th will be focused on the Open Technology Development effort within the federal government. The 15th will focus on open source geospatial capabilities and support for those technologies. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation will guide the planning and agenda for 15 March.

Conflict with venue is resolved and conference continues on schedule, March 14-15, Hyatt Crystal City, Arlington VA. Attendees have choice of attending just one day, or both days. Day one focuses on DoD Open Technology Development. Led by Advanced Systems and Concepts organization of OSD, it focuses on making open standards, architecture and open source software metods available in DoD acquisition processes.

Day two focuses on Open Geospatial Software, co-sponsored by OSGeo. Please watch AFEI website (www.afei.org) for more details. Registration will begin soon. - Dave Chesebrough, President, AFEI

Marketing

This is an opportunity to communicate the benefits of OSGeo and Open Technologies to government agencies and contractors. Perhaps the key message is that these technologies are mature and supportable through existing organizations and companies.

Why should you attend?

Learn about the latest trends in bringing open technologies solutions into government systems and acquisitions. A special focus will demonstrate open source geospatial solutions and their supporting organizations and companies. Open source software and open systems have revolutionized how complex architectures are implemented. The collaboration, tools, and technologies used in open source systems provide agile technology paths that are critical in our ever changing environment. This conference will educate the participants on open technology initiatives and open source software solutions that are backed with commercial support.

Who should attend?

Decision makers, systems integrators and technologists from contractors and government that are interested in how to improve government solutions through the use of open architectures and open source software. The conference will focus on the efforts of the Open Technology Development Initiative within the Department of Defense with a special focus on advanced open source geospatial technologies from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Agenda

14 Mar - Open Technology and the Federal Government

Keynote Speakers

Confirmed:
Chris Dibona, google open source manager

Possible:
Sue Payton (AF Aq) - no
Gen Croom (DISA)
Capt Shannon (Navy OA)
Eric Haseltine (DNI)

Panels/Sessions

AM

- Business
SI's
Vendors
Ecipse.org

- Gov
GSA
DDR&E
DoD Software Group
JFCOM
OSD-NII
others

PM

2 tracks
- 1st track, open source 101 (andy gordon has the material)
- 2nd track, advanced issues

Hosted Social - Unisys

15 Mar - Open Source Geospatial Software and the Government

The goal this day of the conference is to educate the attending government decision makers and contractors that open source geospatial technologies are mature and supportable. These technologies and open source practices would provide substantial benefits to government programs and projects. The collaborative technology development methodologies employed by open source geospatial projects can be accessed through collaboration with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Potential speakers:
Tyler Mitchell - OSGeo Executive Director (accepted)
Gary Lang - VP Autodesk (invited)
Mark Lucas - Large DATA JCTD/OSSIM
Dave McIlhagga - DM Solutions
Canadian Government Speaker (DM)
Joel Schlagel - US Army Corps of Engineers (accepted)
Al Kelly - Ilabs (accepted)
Jim Long - NGA (accepted)
Chris Holmes - openplans.org (accepted)
Michele Weslander - DNI CIO (invited)
MetaCarta - OpenLayers
Refractions - Paul Ramsey uDig, PostGIS (accepted)

Agenda

Keynote Speakers

Government Keynote

OSGeo Keynote - Tyler Mitchell

Panels

Potential panelists, moderators

Panels

3:00-4:30(?) - Industry Panel Discussion: "Best Practices in Use of Open Geospatial in Government"

• moderator: Michael P. Gerlek (mpg) - LizardTech & OSGeo
• panelists: [still under development]
  • "nonprofit/NGO"
  • "small company"
  • "large company"
  • "OS-dedicated company" - Paul Ramsey
  • "major defense contractor"
• topics & questions: [still under development]
  • Welcome and Intro (mpg)
  • Intro, by each panelist
  • topic: How can use OS software be used in various govt/DOD projects?
    • as finished product? for integration into larger package? for extension/customization?
  • topic: What barriers exist to OS adoption in projects?
    • concerns about IP? concerns about GPL/viral licenses? lack of understanding / misconceptions about what "OS" is?
  • topic: How to manage OS-based projects within the traditional DOD arena?
    • OS development style is different; how does this affect the traditional DOD procurement, contracting, and development processes?
  • topic: What kinds of DOD projects are suitable for OS?
    • large multiyear projects? small R&D-type efforts? ..?
  • topic: Specific examples of successes and failures from panelists?
  • [other topics?]
  • Final thoughts, by each panelist
  • Conclusion and Thanks (mpg)

Presentations

Case Studies in Open Source Geospatial

Business and government have been deploying open source geospatial infrastructures in mission critical portions of the operations for the last several years. Why do they do it? What is the value? What have the results been? This talk will cover several case studies of government organizations and business that have deployed the PostGIS open source spatial database and related open source technologies to meet their business needs, and will discuss the business value derived through the adoption of an open source infrastructure.

Paul Ramsey

Paul Ramsey is the President and founder of Refractions Research, a spatial database and geomatics consultancy. Refractions' staff of 30 provide consulting on spatial database design, spatial data infrastructures and enterprise GIS systems. Refractions is heavily involved in the open source geomatics community, making contributions and providing commercial support for PostGIS, Mapserver, GeoTools, GeoServer and uDig.

Paul has been working with spatial data, open spatial standards and open source tools for the past 8 years, and has kept Refractions focussed on open source tools and technologies. As a frequent conference presenter and writer on geospatial topics, Paul maintains a high profile in the professional geospatial community. Paul holds a BSc in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia and a MSc in Statistics from the University of Victoria.

Chris Holmes

'Chris Holmes is Managing Director, Strategic Development of The Open Planning Project (TOPP), a non-profit organization based in New York. TOPP's mission is to build technology to enhance the role of the citizen in democratic society, and leads development on the open source GeoServer Project to help create a free, distributed, and open geographic information infrastructure. TOPP is more of a hybrid organization, similar to the Mozilla Foundation, in that it employs top developers to advance the state of open source software, and can perform contract work to serve as expert implementors on GeoServer. Chris has served as lead developer of GeoServer, and currently chairs the Project Steering Committee, and he is also on the Project Management Committee of GeoTools, the leading Java GIS toolkit. Chris is additionally a board member of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation, of which GeoTools is a founding project.'

And a blurb. I can change it around any which way, it's just what occurred to me first.

'This talk will give an introduction to the Java 'stack' of Open Source Geospatial Software that has been quickly maturing in to some of most solid mapping solutions, open source or otherwise. At the center is GeoTools, a generic GIS Java toolkit and an OSGeo project, which in turn has been combined with a variety of best of breed open source Java projects for particular applications. GeoServer is built upon GeoTools and the Spring framework, plus either Tomcat or Jboss, while uDig builds upon GeoTools plus the Eclipse RCP to build a flexible, customizable desktop GIS. And a number of other projects are emerging. The talk will also look to the future, of what's on the immediate horizon and what will be possible as the community of users, supporters and developers grows.'

And contact info:

Chris Holmes
cholmes@openplans.org
Managing Director, Strategic Development
The Open Planning Project
349 W. 12th Street #3
New York, NY 10014
718-290-5730.