We would like to briefly introduce OSGeo to you and trigger your interest in contributing to our mission. While our geospatial projects thrive, OSGeo also faces challenges. These include community involvement, our relationship with other FOSS foundations, financial health of the foundation, professionalisation of both OSGeo as a foundation and FOSS4G conference organisation, stricter requirements around information and IT security and the need for an OSGeo Europe foundation. All examples where OSGeo needs your involvement as a community member. We would like to kick start a round of discussions during this conference and follow up on those topics during Bird of a Feather sessions and online through existing or ad-hoc committees.

In this talk, the authors plan to take you on the development road of an initiative- community led and supported by ESA - to ingeniously map the complex and dynamic ecosystem of open source for geospatial solutions. Started in 2016 as a volunteer initiative to understand the connections and dependencies between geospatial foss by summarily documenting it in a spreadsheet, it continued with the development of a resources platform for geospatial data exploitation, that combined modern and efficiency in data collection and representation (no more spreadsheets! ), with a significantly more thorough project documentation process, as well as clear steps in the direction of community building. Having more than 300 FOSS projects documented, the team is taking the next big leap. Trying to figure out how to not only map but also extract significant quality metrics that could lead to a better, more robust understanding of the open source for geospatial ecosystem.

For geospatial enthusiasts, working with data, debugging code, running geospatial algorithms, making maps and then more maps to best depict the momentary state of an environmental or socio-economic variable - it is a great and valuable use of working time. But how to get that valuable knowledge into the radar of non-geospatial people working time? On the radar of the professionals that could/would highly benefit from geospatial knowledge but have no time, interest or curiosity to invest into learning new geo-dedicated skills? What about the operational businesses for which tabular data and e-mail are the main working tools and have no resources to invest into bringing the geospatial component on board? It is no secret that selling geo-services is not easy for proprietary software, with a marketing budget and sales people. Building on top of FOSS and then crossing the bridge from research to operational brings interesting, yet quite numerous obstacles to overcome as well.
In this talk, the authors present the long and sinuous road of getting the geospatial-extracted knowledge outside the geospatial field into the..wild.