Participants
Representatives from the following companies have confirmed attendance and sponsorship:

• OpenGeo
• Camptocamp
• terrestris
• Mapgears

These organizations have provided core developers for GeoExt 1.x and have experience as service providers building applications with ExtJS 4. We’re excited to work with them again as we help develop GeoExt 2.0

Sponsor search
A week-long gathering of eight developers calls for a budget of $52,000. This covers travel, accommodations and partly the developers themselves. While much of this cost is being borne by the participating organizations we have not been able to close the gap.

We are looking for sponsors to help. Sponsors will be named explicitly and are encouraged to input their priorities for desired functionality in GeoExt 2.0.

Call for sponsorship
The participating organizations would like to invite all organizations and users utilizing GeoExt to sponsor the code sprint. Becoming a sponsor ensures the benefits from the new functions that will be implemented.

Congratulations to the OpenLayers development team on the release of OpenLayers 2.11!

This release is a big one, closing over 380 outstanding tickets and providing significant performance improvements. The biggest win is the mobile support enhancements. OpenLayers now allows features to be dragged and zoomed with touch gestures on mobile devices. Handlers for pinching and zooming have also been added to the library.

Other key highlights are the plethora of performance enhancements and the additional support for accessing Bing Maps tiles. The release notes go into detail about all of the new features and you can see them in action on the OpenLayers demo site—to really get a feel for the improvements open the demo in a mobile browser.

OpenGeo is committed to the OpenLayers project and we’re eager to support it however we can. A good deal of the development was done by OpenGeo team members Tim Schuab, Andreas Hocevar and Bart van den Eijnden in February as a part of the code sprint hosted by Camptocamp and Swisstopo. That week in Switzerland proved to be a critical step forward in pushing mobile enhancements and the 2.11 release to completion. A full recap of the sprint is accesible from Tim’s post on the OpenLayers blog.

Thanks again to the OpenLayers team, the supporters of the code sprint and everyone who has contributed to this new release!

There’s something thrilling about walking the streets of a large city and randomly running into people you know. The tribes of open source geospatial are converging on Denver this weekend, and in restaurants and on the patios, groups are forming, huddling around the glow of backlit screens, changing incantations: CSS, HTML5, Javascript, Scala, Ug!

For OpenGeo, this was a propitious day, our first international partner meeting. Representatives from over a dozen OpenGeo partner firms gathered at the Sheraton to share experiences and strategize about how to keep pushing open source geospatial into the mainstream. Check out the picasa album from the event.

For me, the surprise was how similar the partners were in many respects. Mostly mid-size (20-200 staff) working within a geographical territory, mostly in system integration, mostly working with a mix of proprietary and open solutions, mostly having some very notable large clients within their area (national agencies, military, etc). Everyone was very up on the technology, and already had some substantial clients engaged with open source one way or another. While there were many horror stories shared about conservative customers wedded to their proprietary software, everyone had an upbeat view of the future: the overall trend is towards more interest in exploring and adopting open source.

Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest with the first two days of workshops. I’ll be teaching the Introduction to PostGIS from 8 to noon, so look for me staggering out of the Sheraton at lunch, clutching my poor tired vocal chords!

We’re excited to announce the first meeting of our Global Partner Network!

We’ll be having our first annual OpenGeo Global Partner Meeting in Denver, Colorado on September 11th—just prior to the FOSS4G Conference. Getting together with our our rapidly growing network of international partners will allow us to discuss our plans for continuing to support the increasing demand for open source geospatial software.

We’re thrilled to work together to increase the reach of open source geospatial technologies in real-world solutions for clients. Our partners are crucial in helping users around the world improve their geospatial applications using open source software. They extend the first line of support for the OpenGeo Suite, provide important translation services for core components like GeoServer, and are skilled at implementing solutions based on proven open source software.

To learn more about OpenGeo’s Global Partner Network please visit our partner page. Interested in becoming an OpenGeo partner? Contact us!

GeoServer 2.1.0 was released late last week, after almost a full year of development work. You can read about the full details of all of the new features on the GeoServer Blog.

There are over a dozen new headline features, some of them quite large improvements: WMS 1.3, WMS Cascading, virtual services, GeoWebCache direct WMS integration. What do all of these new features have in common? They were all funded by organizations who are using GeoServer and want to see it develop and thrive. Some developments were made possible by OpenGeo, some by other commercial providers such as GeoSolutions and Refractions Research. A few were funded by OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition clients. All of these organizations may not have much in common operationally, yet their funding of this open source project has made a valuable software tool even more valuable for everyone.

We want to specifically thank those organizations who have contributed to GeoServer during this release cycle:

• Ordnance Survey - WMS 1.3.0
• MassGIS - WCS limits
• OBIS - Layers from SQL
• Landgate - Virtual Services
• SWECO - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• Malmö City of Sweden - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• University of Perugia - WMS Cascading

As we reflect on this milestone, we should remember that GeoServer is everyone’s project. Whether you just play around and report a bug or are a state agency using GeoServer in production, you are part of a large and thriving community. Your work, and your funding, helps improve the software.

So the next time someone asks why one would pay for ‘free’ software, take a look at this list. GeoServer is yours—and your funding makes it happen.

Look for GeoServer 2.1.0 as part of the next version of the OpenGeo Suite, coming soon.

If you use desktop GIS software, you’ve probably been keeping an eye on the proliferation of web-based GIS. Perhaps you’ve even wanted to get involved but have been reluctant to migrate away from familiar tools. Well, you’re in luck! Our partner, GeoCat, has recently released GeoCat Bridge, an extension to ArcMap that allows users to publish their data using the OpenGeo Suite simply and easily.

With GeoCat Bridge, you can continue to use all of the tools provided by Esri to style and edit maps on your desktop and then use Bridge to publish the contents to the OpenGeo Suite. Bridge handles the data loading as well as the conversion of style information to Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), the markup language used for styling within the OpenGeo Suite.

It’s a great day for users of desktop GIS software—call it a bridge to the future.

Learn more about GeoCat Bridge and the OpenGeo Suite

In October, we announced two new participants in our partner program, from Brazil and South Africa, that will help us support open source geospatial technologies for a significant base of users in the Southern Hemisphere.  The past few weeks, we’ve been very excited to announce three new partnerships in Europe, ensuring that geospatial service providers can offer open source solutions to clients in Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

GET Ltd., based in Athens, is a dominant provider of geoinformatic marketing and service solutions in Greece and Cyprus.  Their mission is to provide solutions for easy access to quality local geographic information to both the general public and advanced users. Across the Mediterranean, Geodata Sistemas is a leading GIS services company with over a decade of experience serving Spanish administrations responsible for territorial management.  Geodata advocates the use of open source technologies in order to make those applications and data accessible to a range of users—from technical personnel to the general public. Finally, hailing from Bonn, Germany, terrestris GmbH & Co. KG specializes in spatial data infrastructures as well as open source geoportals. The company proudly maintains a strong presence in the international open source GIS community, and will support work with us to serve the German, Swiss, and Austrian markets.

Through service provider agreements with OpenGeo, these companies will be able to offer their clients solutions based upon the OpenGeo Suite, our OGC standards–compliant web mapping platform that includes GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoWebCache, PostGIS, and GeoExt.  Together, we’re making it easier, faster, and more affordable for European organizations to deploy compelling geospatial applications online.

We work every day to make geospatial information more open by developing technologies that enable collaboration, accessibility and transparency.  Our partnerships are an amazing way to help more organizations and communities use these tools and receive support from regional experts, so keep an eye out for more OpenGeo dispatches from distant lands!

Last week I was in Japan, attending the FOSS4G.JP events put on by OSGeo Japan in Tokyo and Osaka. The enthusiasm of the local community was infectious, as was the FOSS4G montage.

In Tokyo, I presented my talk on open source economics, “Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts“; in Osaka, the more technical “State of PostGIS“.

One thing that the experience made clear to me was the need to press forward with localizing the OpenGeo Suite so that our local partners (Orkney and MapConcierge) can more easily evangelize. English is nice as a universal language of commerce, but when it’s time to learn and build, you have to meet people where they live and in their own language.

Our partner program continues to grow as Inovação joins us to provide sales and support of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition in Brazil. Inovação is a leader in the Brazilian market and serves customers in energy, utilities, mining, government, and telecommunications. They are also engaged with public and private organizations to implement the Brazilian national data model (MND) and other standards including ISO, APDM, and FGDC.

AfriSpatial, an expert GIS systems and services provider, and OpenGeo are teaming to bring the first Enterprise FOSS stack offering to the southern African market. AfriSpatial will be providing first line support for the OpenGeo Suite for end users in countries throughout southern Africa, with OpenGeo in turn providing support to AfriSpatial.

AfriSpatial is a pioneering SME in the southern African GIS community, with access to a large network of skilled local resources. Gavin Fleming from AfriSpatial also leads the local OSGeo Chapter and brought FOSS4G to South Africa. With the addition of the OpenGeo Suite to its offerings, AfriSpatial can now fill a major gap in the market—for those organizations needing the lower risk and powerful backing of an enterprise-class product.

An example of a current, local, high profile project using OpenGeo components where AfriSpatial is the lead geospatial contractor is Tracks4Africa, which uses PostGIS and OpenLayers.