Romanian Chapter Report 2007

Introduction

The idea of starting an Romanian OSGeo local chapter came out after FOSS4G2006 but it begin to shape after FOSS4G2007.

What we accomplished until now:

1. Visibility at conferences and workshops:

• October 25-27 - 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).
• December 11 - 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)
• December 12, 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.

2. Romanian articles and tutorials published on geo-spatial.org:

• http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-I (FOSSGIS applications review: toolkits and libraries)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/open-source-gis-II (FOSSGIS applications review: desktop software)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/vtp-primii-pasi (VTP tutorial)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/wingrass (GRASS Windows installation tutorial)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/instalare-grass-macosx (GRASS MacOSX installation tutorial)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/bazin-hidrografic-prin-QGIS-GRASS (GRASS+QGIS watershed delineation)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/vtocx (VTP vtocx tutorial)
• http://earth.unibuc.ro/tutoriale/manipulare-date-spatiale-gdal-raster (GDAL tutorial)

3. Romanian 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

4. 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)

5. Meetings

• Thursday evening, on 28th, we will have the first meeting (in a local pub here in Bucharest) between authors and users of geo-spatial.org. The main topics will be related to RO local chapter. Will try to see how we can form a legal entity (like an NGO), search for volunteers for translation of OSGeo website and software, etc. Until now we have 15+ people signed in. Details of the meeteng can be found on the geo-spatial.org mailing list, Romanian only (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/geo-spatial/). On Friday i'll be back with a short summary of the evening.