T.Dubya.

Open OceanMap Screenshot

It’s nice to see some news sources running stories on our software development at Ecotrust.  We received a Mellon Award last week in DC for our work on Open OceanMap.  OPB and and San Francisco Chronicle were kind enough to interview and run stories presenting the case for our software and its use to capture fishermen’s knowledge to try and minimize the impact of implementing marine reserves on fishing communities.

(more…)

I cruised down to Eugene on Friday for the Hot Apps conference sponsored by Oregon URISA. Anselm Hook was along for the ride. The theme this year was open source GIS and was focused particularly on the web. Paul Ramsay was invited down to do the morning workshop which was essentially a crash course in web GIS. It included the use of free software and free API’s like Google maps.

There was excitement on the faces of some workshop attendees when we showed up at the end of the morning session.  Most of them work for local and state government agencies and had never had the opportunity to get their hands on this stuff.

I demoed the Inforain watershed locator and Forestland carbon calculator web tools along with the OpenOceanMap desktop tool based on QGIS.  They really liked seeing a web-based GIS being used to do more than just visualization and attribute display.  The carbon calculator is destined for greater things.  Most were also happy to know that OpenOceanMap has been field tested, being used for interviewing fisherman down in California as part of the process of defining marine protected areas.

It was time once again tonight to preach the open source GIS gospel to the masses.

I felt much better prepared this time with a variety of new demos using QGIS, PostGIS, and Grass. The students really seemed to respond to the extra dose of demos, much needed I think around 8-9pm at night… Also just three months ago I really had no polished applications from work to show off, tonight I had at least three including the Watershed Locator, ODFW demo and Aaron Racicot’s Open Ocean Map. They really show the progress Aaron and I have made in the last few months.

Download Slides

Download Base Data

Students, your comments on my presentation are more than welcome, you can leave them right on this site. Especially the stuff I can do better. I really enjoyed your questions, it was clear some of you were actually paying attention. I hope I inspired at least a single person to try some of the tools out.

Tonight, I gave a rousing talk on open source GIS to a group of students at Portland State University.

I have not doubt they will seek out the things of which I spoke! I hope you students enjoyed it, I’ve never talked for 45 minutes straight in my entire life.  Feel free to leave me a comment!

Here is the presentation for your viewing pleasure (download)