GeoLivre Wrapup

Whew! I am sure tired ... and there is still some hacking to be done tonight (something about SIRGAS2000 polyconic projection that is holding back GeoServer in this market).

Yesterday I talked about the range of government representatives present; today I want to run through the sponsors and thank them - and perhaps figure out what they are doing and why they are interested in open source.

First up is OpenGeo; yes that is very confusing but apparently they had the name first! This company appears to make up the vast majority of the organising committee and I have had a great time chatting with their developers about code, scala, mapping and the fact that Brasilia is shaped like an airplane. The company has been causing trouble since 2003 and has been involved with open source from the start. The founder, Helton Uchoa, discovered source while working in the Brasilian army. Business is built around consulting with a smattering of products. This is the third time they have been involved GeoLivera.

The next sponsor is the eye of sauron and the friendly military construction department. This department is new to open source software and is developing government resource planning software by the name of OPUS. There were several presentation of OPUS over the course of the week building up a picture of an asset manager with "geospatial intelligence" (ie georeferrenced assets).

Next we have the science and technology department and geographic services department. The geographic services department had an exciting presentation of sigDesktop and sigWeb which have been in development for two years. The desktop application is C++ qt application similar to QuantumGIS. The sigWeb app combines PHP, C++ and PostGIS. It sounds like that are very happy with their results thus far.

Is a new venture with open source tools working with Brazilian state governments on environment planning. This seems to be a hot topic with every construction activity requiring a environmental impact report.

I would like to extend my thanks to the sponsors for support OSGeo Brasil in an excellent week of open source advocacy.

The local chapter has done a very impressive job of publicity for this event; and you could see their joy as the live presentation feeds brought in viewers from Sao Paulo (30%), Rio de Janeiro(12%), Recife, Salvador, Porto Alegre and Venezuela. They also broke out the traditional web 2.0 stream of tweets, blogs and the occasional dose of print media.

Apparently they sent registered mail invites to everyone government department they could throw a stone at - and this city was made specifically to house all the government. Not even the president escaped. FOSS4G should considered this approach - especially for the local area.