Romanian Chapter Report 2007

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Introduction

The idea of starting an Romanian OSGeo Local Chapter came out after FOSS4G2006 but it begin to shape after FOSS4G2007. For the moment, the main vehicle for FOSS & OSGeo promotion is geo-spatial.org. The website (Romanian only at this point) represents a collaborative effort by and for the Romanian community to facilitate the sharing of geospatial knowledge and the discovery and publishing of free geographic datasets and maps. Anyone can make a contribution by submitting articles or datasets for publication, adding comments to the existing articles, join the discussion on the mailing list or user’s forum.

Key Accomplishments

  • Visibility at conferences and workshops:
    • 25-27 October 2007: a general presentation of geo-spatial.org, Romanian in formation chapter and OSGeo was done at the 15th GIS Users Conference, in Chisinau (Rep. Moldova).
    • 11 December 2007: a more detailed presentation was done at the second National Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference in Bucharest (http://portal.rosa.ro/index.php?item_id=169, http://earth.unibuc.ro/stiri/conferinta-sdi-2007)
    • 12 December 2007: in the framework of the same conference, we manage to organize a open source geospatial software workshop. Detailed presentations and step by step demonstrations were made for: QGIS, uDig, PostGIS, Geoserver, MapWindow, OpenLayers and VTP.
  • Articles:
    • Free and Open Source Geospatial Software. A Complete Alternative to Propriatary Applications (published in a local journal)
    • Developing an Open Romanian Geoportal (presented as poster at FOSS4G2007 and published in a local journal)

Areas for Improvement

  • Get more exposure in media by publishing articles in technical magazines
  • Start translation of the OSGeo Homepage to Romanian
  • Present the FOSS benefits to companies involved in the geospatial business here in Romania

Opportunities to Help

Outlook for 2008

  • First meeting between geo-spatial.org authors and users to discuss about the Romanian OSGeo Local Chapter already took place in a local pub. 17 people attend. The talks covered the need for a legal entity (something like an NGO), the need for more volunteers for translations, the need for a FOSSGIS local conference. Some pictures can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26994138@N00/sets/72157604006886688/
  • Articles and tutorials to be published on geo-spatial.org in the following month:
    • A translation and adaptation of Gary Sherman's "Shuffling Quantum GIS into the Open Source GIS Stack" tutorial (http://earth.unibuc.ro/preview)
    • FOSSGIS applications review: server-side and webmapping applications
    • Mapnik tutorial
    • Two more GDAL/OGR tutorials
    • OpenLayers basic tutorial
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