European GIS Code Sprint

European Code Sprint proposal

This event is planned as European follow-up of the Canadian FOSS4G2007 CodeSprint in September. It is thought for those who for whatever reason did miss the Canadian sprint, but also for those who started something in Canada and need to meet again once more after a few months.

Code Sprint - what's that?

(The following is taken from the page describing the planned Canadian Code Sprint at Foss4G2007.)

A code sprint is usually organized by a group that is using an open source project and wants to see something done. They get the developers to a single location and feed them for a couple of days with the necessities of the hacking life (internet, caffeine, electricity). The communication that happens from face to face hacking usually lasts the project for a year or more. You see this a lot in projects like Drupal etc...

Is this your First Sprint? Here is some background information to get you started:

• http://www.infrae.com/about/activities/sprintathon/tips
• http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2006/10/19/running-a-sprint.html
• Example Sprint (from same people who do GeoServer): http://www.openplans.org/projects/bbq-sprint

To participate, start a section at the bottom of your page for your project.

Who should attend

• Developers that need to meet the community and discuss issues about a particular project.
• Developers that have the feeling that knowing the different projects communities gives added value and often saves from doing things twice
• Power users that are able to contribute documentation, decend bugdescriptions and perhaps even help to fix minor issues.
• Web experts that want to contribute to their favorite projects by helping to set up the web page.

Aims of the SFScon 2007 Code Sprint

For developers:

• bring different projects to know each other and build up some standard interaction
• let the teams of each project meet, discuss, design and code together fulltime and non-remotely for a few days (this often pushes projects more than months of email and IRC working)
• bugfixing

For Power Users:

• the possibility to meet the developer comunity and help (and be helped) with documentation and translation
• the possibility to propose important bugfixes (prior documented and reproductable, only power user accepted)

For everyone out there:

• Collaborate on the creation of a free dataset by wandering in an ordered way through a defined region with GPS. The dataset should contain as many data as possible, as for example the dataset of the grassbook does. Moreover climatic and hydrologic/hydraulic data should be integrated in order to support different analyses.

The Location

The code sprint will be organized as a post-event of the South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2007 held in Merano (BZ), Italy.

• SFScon location and GIS Code Sprint location is in Merano, at the "Franz Kafka Highschool, and can be found here.

Planned Dates

• 16-17 Nov 2007: South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2007
• 18 Nov 2007 (Sunday): Outdoor GIS data collection for Free data set (somewhere in South Tyrol)
• 19-21 Nov 2007: GIS Code Sprint

Who will organise the sprint

The Free Software Center of Bolzano, Italy, will take care of the organisative part of the event and investigate sponsorings for some parts of the free dataset.

Interested in Coming

Time is rather short and we would like to understand how much interest there is in such an event and more or less how many developer would like to attend.

• Andrea Antonello
• Markus Neteler
• Arnulf Christl
• Jo Walsh
• Mateusz Loskot
• Maurizio Napolitano
• Lorenzo Becchi
• Silvia Franceschi
• Paolo Viskanic

We feel that there is a huge need for a developer meeting that could bring together different projects, that really need to interact if they want to have a glorious future.

Projects attending the sprint

TODO: order alphabetically

QGIS

Goals

• get rid of annoying bugs from bug tracker

GDAL/OGR

Attending

• Mateusz Loskot

Goals

• speed up GRASS/GDAL plugin

GRASS GIS

Attending

• Markus Neteler
• Maurizio Napolitano

Goals

• get rid of annoying bugs from bug tracker
• work with JGrass/uDig on GRASS Vector integration
• speed up GRASS/GDAL plugin
• continue Italian translation of software

JGrass / uDig

Attending

• Andrea Antonello
• Silvia Franceschi

Goals

• cooperation with the GRASS team for GRASS Vector integration in JGrass / uDig
• Italian translation of the project

MAPBENDER

Mapbender currently is mainly driven by German developers and use cases from the public administration. Participation in this event is an attempt to broaden interest at a European level as there is a lot of potential in the Mapbender project to solve issues raised by INSPIRE.

Attending

This is a preliminary set of participants who might be able to attend. Please add yourself.

• User:Arnulf Christl
• Paolo Viskanic
• User:Peter Hopfgartner

Goals

This is a preliminary set of ideas, one or two of them might have a chance to get acted upon.

• plan to set out on a RESTful path
• further develop i18n activities (which has been spawned in the region that this development sprint is planned to happen)
• use Mapbender as a web based configuration tool for OpenLayers