Just returned from a week on the road and one of the highlights was GIS in Action, the Oregon and Southwest Washington URISA annual GIS event. There were over 300 people on site for 2 days of great talks, workshops and panels. I was asked again to host one of the Open Source sessions at the conference and we participated on Wednesday. I presented on the OSGeo, some sample applications of the Open Source GIS technology, and even had a quick online IRC chat with Chris Schmidt of Openlayers in front of the crowd. We also had Dean Anderson from Polk County talking about doing open development when confined to a proprietary environment (often the case in government). He had some great examples of developing Arc based software on SourceForge. Finally we had Deborah Bryant from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) to talk about government uptake of Open Source technology. She provides great insight to the front lines of getting Open Source accepted in main stream government. She runs the GOSCON conference and is a wealth of knowledge on the current state of Open Source in government, big and small.

All of the presentations from our Open Source session are posted in my presentation archive…