DOSUG Geospatial Night

[jaredwinick]

There are many open source geospatial tools these days. From Javascript client libraries, to map design, to data processing, to storage systems. It might be interesting to get a few smaller presentations, maybe around 4, that discuss different parts of this ecosystem. Ideally these different topics can be woven together in the context of a simple demo application.

I volunteer to talk about how to do geospatial indexing on Bigtable systems (Accumulo, HBase, Cassandra).

[virtualandy]

I can potentially cover a 'front end GIS' talk (if I can't find someone smarter to do it for us :) ). Could be about D3-style mapping, LeafletJS, OpenLayers, styling maps with TileMill, etc.

[tlberglund]

Trying to think of an appropriate way to express my enthusiasm for this idea. It sounds incredible. Tentatively, what do you guys think of May?

[virtualandy]

Unfortunately May 7th (I think I got that right) is bad for me. There's a chance I could move it (was planning on catching the Yankees Rockies game that night), though.

I'm probably not crucial to this and I'm sure someone could fill my shoes pretty easily.

[jaredwinick]

As far as I know, May would work for me.

[matthewmccullough]

I'm 👍 on the idea. And by the way, the fact that we are using GitHub issues to plan this has me 😀

[jaredwinick]

Ha, and you guys even have an appropriate emoji for this issue 🌐 Andy has done some recruiting on Twitter but like Matthew suggests, I think it would be great to keep all planning on here, rather than via email

[btuttle]

I could do an overview on some of the server options like mapserver, geoserver, and mapnik.

[matthewmccullough]

@btuttle I like an overview. For n00bs, that is one of the greatest gifts and most attractive things you can do to get them into a space they don't know well.

[matthewmccullough]

@jaredwinick @btuttle @virtualandy I'd love for you gents to tell us in bullet points what the lineup should be and what night might work and then we'll support you to make this happen!

[jaredwinick]

With respect to dates, I believe I am wide open, so I could do the May date that @tlberglund suggested. Again, I think it would be awesome if we could tie together the presentations in the context of a simple application. For example, each of the following would be a presentation and part of a demo

• Javascript library (Leaflet.js, etc.) used to render map tiles/vector data ( @virtualandy )
• Server-side technologies for generating and servering the tile/vector data ( @btuttle )
• Queries (from the browser) for geospatial data served by a DB ( @jaredwinick )
• Other processing (GDAL, topojson, etc.) or design (TileMill) ( ??? )

I was planning to present geospatial indexing design on BigTable systems, which may not be as practical to the group as the off-the-shelf use of PostGIS or MongoDB, so I am willing to take people's opinion on that. I was thinking about using LevelDB rather than picking one of the actual systems as I think it will simplify things and make it more academic.

[virtualandy]

Tom Flaherty can cover Leaflet and some friend end stuff (he could cover the whole thing, probably) if the date is in May since I can't make it that night (not a big deal on my end).

I think it would be cool to see several talks that are all tied in to the same project - bonus points if it's some sort of Code For America/Code4Communities type app. But that's probably too hard to pull off in 2 months, so as long as the following gets covered I think it's great:

• Where to find GIS data beyond Twitter/Foursquare (public domain or otherwise)
• How to store/index/search that data, both BigData style and in PostGIS/etc
• How to display that data (as tiles/vectors)
• Other stuff (like @jaredwinick mentioned - GDAL, TileMill, QGIS, etc)

I think that would rock. It's also probably enough topics to cover multiple nights, too.

[virtualandy]

@thesteve0 (of OpenShift/RedHat fame) has a good blog series on geospatial stuff: https://www.openshift.com/blogs/finding-and-making-sense-of-geospatial-data-on-the-internet is the start. There's some good resources/links in there and a short talk that sort of covered the same topics would probably be pretty good.
Unfortunately...I still can't make the May date. But that might be a good blueprint for someone else to cover. Just a thought.

[matthewmccullough]

To give some planning breathing room, I would love to target June as the Geo night. Can we get a word on which geo-centric presenters and people this works for?

[jaredwinick]

I could do June, though I believe there is an AngularJS meetup the same night (June 4th) that I would go to otherwise and might possibly compete for attendees/presenters.

[thesteve0]

I might be able to come back and do a presentation on that night as well.
But I do not want to compete with an Angular night - that is some great
technology.

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Jared Winick notifications@github.comwrote:

I could do June, though I believe there is an AngularJS meetup the same
night (June 4th) that I would go to otherwise and might possibly compete
for attendees/presenters.

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