PDX-OSGEO

PDX-OSGEO is a proposed Local Chapter of OSGeo. PDX-OSGEO has a cachement area equal to the PDX airport, Oregon and SW Washington (Vancouver, WA / Clark County, WA). Monthly meetings are held in Portland.

History

PDX-OSGEO has been around and meeting in one form or another since before February 2009 under various names. Since September 2010, we have been recognized as an Oregon-URISA Special Interest Group (SIG). Since 2010, the local chapter has coordinated an open source unconference with ORURISA and GIS In Action. There are also deep roots with our sister OSGeo Local Chapter, CUGOS.

Mission

The OSGeo PDX-OSGEO Chapter strives to promote the local use of Open Source Geospatial software, particularly new users in the Oregon/SW Washington area. The group hosts monthly meetings providing presentation, discussion, and educational opportunities and focuses on materializing an annual Open Source GIS unconference.

Objectives

Monthly Meetings, usually totaling 10/year:

Presentations (Application and Technical)
Chapter business
Social gathering

Regional Events:

Open Source GIS unconference
Conference participation

Communication:

Mailing List
Wiki Development
Monthly meetings

Legal Status:

No real independent legal structure.
No real capacity to independently hold funds in other than ad hoc informal manner.
Affiliations with OSGeo and ORURISA help us with some of the tasks that require legal recognition as an independent entity.
There are currently no plans to seek any independent legal structure in the future.

Getting Involved

The PDX-OSGEO Local Chapter is a flexible organization, join us and help steer.

Mailing List

Please join our mailing list to make sure that you know what's going on. Sign up and participate (or just lurk for a while). You do need to answer the questions (what is your favorite map and something else I think) to the extent needed to demonstrate that you are a person and have the minimal amount of GEO knowledge to not be a random spammer. google email group

If you want to help on planning meetings, join the planners list.

IRC

We can be found on irc://irc.freenode.net/#osgeo-pdx when there is something to discuss.

Membership

Anyone who wants to help support our mission is free to become a member. List yourself on the PDX-OSGEO Member Page and you're in!

Leadership

To the extent that we think that we need leadership, it is Percy. Mostly we expect everyone to step up and help on most tasks resulting in a light load for all.

Wiki

How To Write WIKI

Check out WikiPedia, where else. This is a great resource for many wiki writing tips

How to Write Wiki

Annual Reports

2011 Unconference

The annual Open Source GIS Unconference was coordinated in conjunction with GIS In Action. There was an Open Source GIS Smackdown on Tuesday at 10:30am right after the Keynote. In addition to the Unconference, there was additional presentations on Open Source applications through GIS in Action that were well worth checking out.

2011 GIS in Action Notes

GIS in Action, Tuesday March 29, 2011, 10:30-12:00: GIS Smackdown
GIS in Action, Tuesday March 29, 2011, 3:30-5:00: Scripting and Beyond
GIS in Action, Wednesday March 30, 2011, 1:30-3:00: ESRI and Open Source
GIS in Action, Wednesday March 30, 2011, 3:15-3:24: Update on Japan Crisis Mapping

Unconference Sessions

Time	Room 328	Room 338
10:00am-11:00am	Civic apps, OSM and State / Authoritative data	Routing in Open Source
11:00am-noon	Crisis Mapping: RDTN.org	Can Open Source Replace ESRI?
1:30pm-2:30pm	State of OR Services and Standards	QGIS Python Extensions
2:30pm-3:30pm	Open Street Maps HowTo	Getting started with 'R'
3:30pm-4:30pm	Building Minecraft Maps with USGS Data	Integrating OpenLayers with GeoExt

= (preliminary) unconference lessons learned ===

Some discussion that Fri/Sat is a better day then Thur because more people can attend that are otherwise at work. Worth discussion before next year.

Two rooms was fine for venue was fine

Refreshments were sufficient. Lets see if we can get GIA to donate leftovers again.

Timing was OK once it started; but start time and planning should be tightened up some. Everyone that was going to be there at 9:00 was!

Where are all the notes that people took - please send to the listserv pdxosgis group or plug in here.

Hackathon-Crisis Map session at backspace on Friday averaged between 6-7 people. Lots of education about OSM and Tools. Would have liked to see more people there - maybe same day as main event - could be a 1/2 day tract on un-conference day. It was good to have something to focus on too.

April 1, 2011 April Fools' Hackathon

The Hackathon is OPEN. We're meeting at Backspace from 11am-2p. Submit your ideaz here.

Crisis Camp Japan
Documenting and How To's
For people who don't want to do Hackathon activities, they could help with mapping the (Japan) crisis area for OpenStreetMap. See also, OSM wiki
I've got a fairly complete open source GIS stack built as an openSUSE Linux appliance. It consists of R plus the R "Spatial" task view plus all of its dependencies (Proj4, Grass, GDAL, PostGIS) plus QGIS. But not all of us run openSUSE Linux - yet ;-). I'd like to see this stack ported to Windows and MacOS X. I can do Ubuntu and Fedora ports myself if anyone's interested, and I can help with the Windows port. The scripts are on Github at [1] and [2] if anyone wants to get a head start on this.

Volunteers

Thanks to all of you who presented, helped organized, or took a shift at the PDX-OSGeo booth at the events!

Social Media - Following the Unconference

Twitter aggregators - suggested tags: #GIA, #pdxosgeo
Foursquare
Geoloqi - Log in with your Twitter ID or sign up: Geoloqi site

Google Group google email group

Event Set Up

Event set up notes.

Upcoming events where PDX-OSGEO members may participate or present

WhereCamp
Sun 2012-09-30 - Thu 2012-10-4 [www.urisa.org/gispro2012 URISA GIS-Pro 2012]
Sat 2012-10-13 OpenStreetMap's [www.stateofthemap.org/ 'State of the Map US' Conference]

Resources

SPRING GIS

SPRING is a state-of-the-art GIS and remote sensing image processing system with an object-oriented data model which provides for the integration of raster and vector data representations in a single environment. SPRING is a product of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE/DPI (Image Processing Division)...

This documentation was translated and written by USFWS. At one point it was downloadable from the internet although I can't find it now.
Some seems excellent. Some still has areas that could use polish. It is listed as a draft.

USDA - NRCS SSURGO Soil Database Migration to PostgreSQL

An example of how to get SURGO soils data into a PostgreSQL database on a GNU/Linux-based OS.

File:SSURGO to PostgreSQL.odt|USDA - NRCS SSURGO Soil Database Migration to PostgreSQL

The top seven alternatives to the Google Maps API

Wm Leler of the PDX-OSGEO presented this topic and .Net Magazine requested that he write it up at http://www.netmagazine.com/features/top-seven-alternatives-google-maps-api Article date: 2012-06-18.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to various OSGeo local chapters and other wiki contributors whose work we borrowed and particularly CUGOS.