Friday started off with the “Open x 4″ panel, which had theoretical potential, but failed in the usual way panels do: lack of focus and excessive collegiality. For me the highlight was Peter Batty’s impersonation of Steve Coast (very convincing, in my opinion!).

Friday was also “PostGIS day” after a fashion, with 5 PostGIS-specific talks in a row. I started the series, with Tips for the PostGIS Power User (and here’s a link to the State of PostGIS talk I gave on Wednesday).

I was followed by Steven Singer with a talk on PostGIS replication. Really, a talk on PostgreSQL replication, since PostGIS support in PostgreSQL “just works”. The takeaway is that there are a couple means of replication available, the streaming replication available since PostgreSQL 9.0, which is suitable for replicating an entire instance, and the table-based replication available from packages like Slony and Skytools. For some use cases, like sharding, it makes more sense to use a table-based set-up. For other use cases, like high availability, using streaming replication of the whole instance is better.

Next up, Pierre Racine from Laval University gave an update on the new raster support in PostGIS. Raster will be released at PostGIS 2.0, and will bring a whole new toolbox for GIS analysis in the database. There was an incredible amount of excitement at Pierre’s talk, as the reality of the power of raster/vector analysis sunk in with folks in the audience. I predict that most of the new features added from 2.0 onwards are going to be in the raster side, as there are so many interesting areas for new features (contouring, surface fitting, density mapping, map algebras, etc, etc, etc).

After lunch, PostGIS day continued with Jim Mlodgenski presenting on the Stado (formerly GridSQL) parallel query system for PostgreSQL. Jim recently updated Stado to support PostGIS, which is a huge development. I was particularly piqued to hear this talk, since it is a direct response to my keynote at PgCon where I noted that an area of pain for PostGIS is the single-threaded query process in PostgreSQL. With Stado we can now leverage as many nodes as we want in processing spatial queries. For BI and spatial reporting, this is huge.

(My only regret about taking in Jim’s talk was missing GeoGlobalDomination: The Musical, which was going on at the same time.)

Finally, the most anticipated talk at FOSS4G, the review of new PostGIS 2.0 features from Regina Obe and Leo Hsu, my collaborators on the PostGIS steering committee. Though dense with SQL, the presentation got folks juices flowing: 3D support, new functions for slipping and snapping geometry, raster of course, topology models, the replacement of geometry_columns with a view, and more.

The conference wrapped up with thanks for the local committee and organizers, and very well deserved: the program, the venue, the parties, everything was excellent.

During the closing plenary, I was especially happy that my long-time Victoria colleague Martin Davis received the Sol Katz Award for his work on the JTS geometry library and work in supporting computational algorithm development throughout the geo open source community.

I’ll wrap Saturday into this final post: the code sprint was very well attended, and I was impressed to see folks in MapServer and OpenLayers with laptops cracked open and code being hacked. The PostGIS team huddled and coordinated our goals for the 2.0 release, setting a feature freeze date (end of November) and a first beta date (early January). But I personally only had the energy for one trivial bug fix, it’s been a long (and enjoyable) week.

Thanks everyone for an amazing FOSS4G!

Talks, talks, so many talks!

Opening plenary Thursday was all open data, all the time. It started with Peter ter Haar from the UK Ordnance Survey, not an organization renowned for its openness, but one that has been wrestling with existential questions and moving towards open over the last few years: how to meet government open data mandates while still performing cost recovery? Peter says OS has moved from an everything-closed licensing model to a freemium model, where some data and services are free and other premium ones are not. It will be interesting to watch Ordnance Survey continue to evolve over coming years.

Then we got a taste of Open Street Map, which made me wish I’d been able to come a few days earlier. The OSM community continues to be a real hotbed of great news ideas for engaging folks in geography. My favourite from the talk: a mobile address verification application, but cast as a video game, with a medieval theme and rankings of the top players.

Finally, Michael Byrne presented on the open data aspects of the FCC Broadband Map and Developers API initiatives. While the open source aspects of Michael’s story is compelling (turning around a high visibility project with incredible load in only a few months using an open source geostack) I find the open data aspects even more compelling. The whole site is based on APIs. So the architecture completely separates the data feeds from the user interface, which makes the UI completely modular and ensures that everything is available to third parties for re-mixing. This architectural practice — building APIs, then building sites using only those APIs — is the best possible long-term approach to open data, because it embeds openness at the core of the system.

Friday is PostGIS day in the Windows room (yes, the Windows room), power users, 2.0 features, raster, replication, query, oh my!

Let the games begin!

At the opening plenary, Peter Batty again took the conference to the “neutral zone” and talked about evaluating all software, open source and proprietary, on a level playing field. Does it do what you need, is it supported, does it have a development future, it is a reasonable price? Good things to think about while evaluating options!

Arnulf Cristl covered the OSGeo point of view, how the organization brings together the diverse communities of open source GIS into an cooperative organization to promote the general growth and health of open source geospatial.

And finally, I got to spend 20 minutes on stage talking about open source business models. As usual, it was a harrowing but enjoyable experience to talk to so many people at once! Video? Of course there’s a video, many thanks to the conference organizers for capturing it.

After the plenary, the technical sessions began and I started off with a recap of the state of the PostGIS project, then sat down to take in a case study from the Norwegian Forests agency. They are migrating from Oracle to PostGIS and have built a clever tool to allow them to replicate from their Oracle to their PostGIS instance during the long period in which they have to run both system simultaneously. Change takes time!

Unfortunately, for the rest of the day I had meetings on the floor and elsewhere, so I took in no other talks to report on! The energy in the conference, on the floor and in the plenaries so far has been amazing. I am tempted to do my best Juan Antonio Samaranch impression and declare Denver to be the “best FOSS4G ever!” Here are some pictures from the conference.

This year, the second workshop day included a new FOSS4G feature: the “FOSS4G for New-comers” session. The all-day track was basically a non-technical introduction to the philosophy of open source, case studies from organizations deploying open source, and a guide to some of the terminology folks could expect.

The session kicked off with Peter Batty explaining his history with FOSS4G, which (gratifying for me) started at FOSS4G in Victoria, exploring PostGIS. Peter covered his rationale for moving increasingly into open source, including his recent shepherding of the Ubisense infrastructure from a largely Google-bases system into an open source system. It all comes down to control: Google’s technology was fine, but the terms of use and lack of control over the future of system was too big a business risk to take over the long term.

A recurring theme throughout the session, pointed out by moderator Brian Timoney, was that of “hybrid approaches”. Using open source or proprietary software is not an either/or proposition, it is an and/also proposition. Every case study cited involved some kind of bridge or connection between open source and proprietary software.

My favorite presentation was from Michael Byrne of the FCC on why they chose open source for the National Broadband Map. And not just because he said the support he got from OpenGeo was “fantastic”. They benchmarked their options, and build prototypes to make sure they were making the right decision, and chose open source on the merits: it was faster, it was more flexible, it fit their needs for handing the expected huge traffic (500K visitors on day one) the map would generate.

Unfortunately the audience had very few questions, so I wasn’t able to meet my personal goal for the session: getting a gauge of what issues are top of mind for managers taking their first foray into the world of open source.

Tomorrow the plenaries and technical sessions begin, and there are many many talks to see. OpenGeo has lots of talks (too many, sadly, for me to go to them all and also see the other ones I want to) this year, and we’ll be having office hours at the booth again this year for folks who need their PostGIS/GeoServer/OpenLayers/GeoExt/GeoNode questions answered.

This year FOSS4G is starting off with two full days of workshops, with gives things a bit more of a slow build to the full plenary and tech sessions from Wednesday to Friday. I woke up bright and early, raided Starbucks, and then delivered my PostGIS workshop to a full classroom of about 60 people. We covered basics of what a spatial database is, using spatial SQL for doing GIS analysis, and some of the new features of PostGIS like the “geography” type. Questions ranged from basics of SQL to queries about the standards coverage of spatial databases in general. I hope my core message got through: regardless of what database you use, moving from desktop GIS to spatial SQL is intensely liberating and empowering for geospatial professionals.

At lunch I sat at a random table and talked about open source with folks from the government, and was somewhat surprised to hear them say that open source is still considered a “second best” or “down market” solution. I thought that, at this late date, folks all up and down the hierarchies of organizations were aware that open source powers some of the largest information organizations in the world: if Silicon Valley and Wall Street are building their critical systems on open source (and they are) surely government can get with the program too!

Tomorrow is another day of workshops, and the “introduction to geospatial open source” for managers and decisions makers, which I will be attending with great interest, as an observer and as a panelist in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to improving my understanding of how open source is perceived at the managerial level.

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!