Open Source development is based on collaboration and communication, and yet a software project may have contributors strewn across the world in different time zones and even used to speaking different languages. The reality of collaborating via the Internet – asynchronous, textual – means it can be harder for new contributors to get up to speed, harder for experienced developers to help each other, and harder to develop features together. Being physically separated from your collaborators also inhibits growth of community and friendships.
For a few years now, the OSGeo Foundation has alleviated these challenges and strengthened the global community of open source geospatial developers by supporting a “code sprint” in a different city each year. After the 2014 event was held in Vienna, it’s coming back across the pond. This February 9th through 13th, Azavea will be pleased to host developers from around the world as they descend on Philadelphia for the 2015 OSGeo Code Sprint. This is the first time the Sprint has been held in Philly and we’re all excited to welcome everyone to our home – a real hotbed of civic hacking, open data, and geo nerd communities that often rely on these geospatial projects. We’re also planning a few fun evening activities in different parts of the city to give participants plenty of chances to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and experience Philly.
The Code Sprint is not like the “civic hackathons” and other events Azavea has organized in the past. Paul Ramsey, one of the core contributors to the PostGIS project, wrote a bit about what the 2013 Boston Code Sprint was like and why you might want to attend. There won’t be competitive teams, prizes or judges like a hackathon. Instead of a short weekend, we will be sprinting together for most of a week. We’ll be improving and adding new features to the foundational geospatial tools common to pretty much any app with maps or geodata like PostGIS, Cesium, uDig, QGIS, GDAL, PDAL, and GeoTrellis. We’ll endeavor to achieve the same welcoming and friendly atmosphere we have at all our events, but if you’re interested in attending, this is definitely an event where preparation pays off. You can just show up and make a contribution, but if you’re not already contributing to a project, it will be more productive if you’ve learned a bit about the project, have a good handle on the languages in use, taken a look at the issue backlog, and have given some consideration to what contribution you’d like to make to it during the week. We’d also encourage you to have checked out the latest development branch and set up a development environment on your laptop in advance.
OSGeo Sprints in past years have been focused on projects specifically stewarded by the OSGeo Foundation and the event began as a gathering of the “C Tribe”, the software applications that use C as their primary language. However, this year we wanted to make the tent of open source geospatial a little bigger and encourage participants to work on all kinds of projects, including projects housed within LocationTech, OSGeo, or even independent projects like Leaflet or CartoDB.
So come join us in Philadelphia next month! Simply put your name on the list on the wiki page so we can plan for you to be here, and book your travel – including a room at the Loew’s Philadelphia at our discounted rate. Open Source is usually a marathon, but let’s sprint while we can!