What I'm up to with FOSS GIS and how I got here

When I moved nearly 3 years ago from CSIR to Mintek, I thought I would be a lone FOSS advocate. The CSIR is a national research organisation of around 3000 people that is pioneering a complete move to open standards and FOSS, firstly developing and then 'learning the ropes' for the implementation of the South African Government Open Source and interoperability policy. In my lab at CSIR, ICT4EO, we'd made the switch early, with several flavours of Linux and a suite of FOSS GIS and image processing applications, for reasons both principled and practical. Mintek is also a national research organisation and has to report an increasing FOSS quota each year to Government, but it is early days. Indeed, Mintek has recently tied itself down for a long while to come with a R4,5m agreement with Microsoft. Yet, I've discovered an in-house LUG, some Linux clusters and a group of like-minded people. I'm willing to bet there's a FOSS kernel like that in every organisation.

Back a few years to my FOSS GIS beginnings. I had 'grown up' in GIS on ArcInfo *nix workstation and early ArcViews and was quite content. My eyes were opened though when EIS-Africa was donated a server to be hosted in my lab at CSIR. Mick Wilson came down from UNEP in Nairobi to set up MapServer and show me how to play with it and keep it going. I also worked on the first South African metadata clearinghouse, with the FGDC's iSite and dabbled in early attempts at online linkages and harvesting, as OGC standards started emerging. The CSIR became the first OGC member in Africa with me as technical contact. My last two years at CSIR were spent at the Satellite Application Centre and ICT4EO, where my research leader, Andrew Terhorst, pushed FOSS relentlessly, so at a stage where the CSIR had switched only their back end to FOSS, we had gone the whole hog, proving in the process that FOSS GIS and image processing tools are diverse and mature enough to support all the functionality a professional facility needs.

Moving across to Mintek, I've set up a dedicated enterprise GIS server running Ubuntu. PostGIS, GeoServer, QGIS and Sensor Web tools based on Bill Howe's OOSTethys Python code are my daily tools while we also run GRASS, uDiG, GeoNetwork and various other apps. We have limited GIS human resources (just 2 of us) and I'd love to build that up with some developer strengths. We also have a couple of ArcView 9 licences which serve their purpose for quality desktop map production. As far as working in a mixed environment goes the major bottleneck to seamless interoperability is that ArcGIS can't read directly from PostGIS nor consume WFS services. Unless of course we spend another fortune on the Interoperability extension. I wonder if ways around this are going to be addressed at FOSS4G 2008?...See you there!