Italiano Chapter Report 2007

Italian Local Chapter

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Massimiliano Cannata --Maxi71 11:55, 22 February 2008 (EST)

Key Accomplishments

• “back office”/administrative management
• Wiki, IRC, mailing list, web site (on Drupal) set-up and maintenance
• production of howtos, help ecc.
• created a debian.gfoss.it package
• GIS Certification - endorsed by ECDL Foundation, (The European Computer Driving License (ECDL) is the European-wide qualification demonstrating competence in computer skills.) - almost completed.
• work on open geodata
  • conversion to WFS of Italian place name database by the National Statistical Office (ISTAT)
  • participation to petitions and license definition
• Support to OpenStreetMap mapping parties (Merano, Pavia, Arezzo, Perugia)
• Extension of contact network (OpenStreetMap, Italian PostgreSQL User Group, identification of almost 2000 recipients for monthly e-mail updates)
• Public relations
  • presence in the media (radio -including a live interview from a major national station, journals, newspapers)
  • developed presentation material (flyer, presentation layout, Youtube spot, gadgets)
• started the population of the Italian web service on FOSS4G users (mapserver, grass, pmapper, etc...)

Areas for Improvement

• try to set up a more effective decision making process, with well-defined activity areas and teams

Opportunities to Help

• Have OSGeo educational material, courses and tutorial for the different OSGeo projects.

This in order to organize workshops at the Italian annual meeting and disseminate OSGeo products

• Have a task and priorities list of OSGeo expected outputs.

Such a kind of list could be helpful to better coordinate the Local Chapter activities with the OSGeo goals and to focus the resources where are more needed.

Outlook for 2008

• 2008 will be the year of promotion.

In Feb. 2007 we started to set up the Italian association gfoss.it and we had to manage many administrative aspects. Then we worked on organization task, in order to set up rules and procedures (members, sponsors, site, etc.). In Sept. 2007, we became the "Italian official Chapter", approved by the OSGeo board.

The next year will be dedicated in promoting OSGeo projects trough Italian geocommunity and administrative offices.

• 2008 Italian OSGeo meeting.

We are working to organize the first OSGeo/gfoss.it meeting, in addition to the traditional Italian GRASS user meeting.

• 2008 increase the number of members.

In 2007 we had a continuous positive trend in members subscription (with a fee currently set at 30 Euro). Currently members are about 25% of the Italian gfoss.it mailing list users: in the next year we hope to reach a 50%