Presenter(s):
Mr. Bob Basques
Mr. Jim Klassen
Getting a non-profit off the ground and running on it's own can be a daunting task. Add in the fact that it's a Geographically oriented non-profit and the issues related to keeping it afloat are compounded. Open Source Software for Non-Profits working in the geographic arena can provide a significant leg up on the competition while at the same time allowing their services to be interchangeable and economically integrated with other like organizations.
The ability to remain flexible and diverse with respect to implementing and maintaining new technologies while still providing value to the customers can be mitigated to a large degree by using the Geographic Open Source tool bag. The possibilities are almost limitless with what can be accomplished. Sometimes it's harder to stop innovating when working in the Open Source world, simply because it's so easy to do. Using core development strategies built around the Open Source model of creation can afford an organization an unprecedented level of freedom in the quality and diverse nature of potential products they can put into production, in many instances accomplishing the tasks both economically as well as working within very tight time lines during the process.
Follow along with us as we describe the triumphs and pitfalls we've encountered while working on our various Open Sourced projects over the last few years and where all of these projects have gotten our organization. We'll demonstrate some of our Open Source projects as well as describe some of our wish list items for the future. Anyone interested in starting their own non-profit or even for profit company will gain some insight from this presentation.
Speaker Bio:
With his 25+ years of work at the City of St. Paul, Minnesota, Bob has extensive experience with GIS web services and enterprise geospatial publishing projects. His efforts to date have focused on design and management of the data catalog for the City's GISmo mapping interface, which feeds the enterprise master spatial data set to desktop applications such as AutoCAD and other off the shelf GIS productss as well as other mapping applications such as GISmo. The GISmo application is built on the GeoMOOSE open source project software, of which, Bob is a founding member. Bob has been involved in GIS related community projects for the last fifteen years. From this diverse 'front line' experience, Bob has gained extensive knowledge in data publishing and distributed data maintenance issues and techniques.
State of the Map, the annual international conference focused on OpenStreetMap, is also being held in Denver immediately before FOSS4G. We encourage you to attend both events!
