\begin{article}
% vol 8 "News" 
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\title{Brief News and Event Announcements from the OSGeo Community}
\author{Compiled by Scott Mitchell}
\maketitle
To keep abreast of OSGeo news, watch \\ \url{http://www.osgeo.org/news}, or subscribe to its RSS feed.  This report includes highlights from recent months, plus items specifically sent to the News Editor.
\section{OSGeo Governance}

\subsection{Charter member elections}
On 12 December 2010, Chief Returning Officer Paul Ramsey announced the election of 10 new OSGeo charter members.  This membership votes for and is drawn from for the OSGeo board of directors.  The new members are Maria Brovelli, Jo Cook, Astrid Emde, Gavin Fleming, Danilo Furtado, Anne Ghisla, Hirofumi Hayashi, Andreas Hocevar, Alex Mandel, and Milena Nowotarska.  Congratulations and thanks to all of the new members.  
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\section{Conferences and Meetings}
\subsection{FOSS4G Denver 2011 Call For Papers}
Paper submissions have been solicited for regular and academic tracks at the upcoming FOSS4G conference (September 12-16). The submission deadline is April 15 for both the academic and regular tracks.  Full details are available at the conference web site.\footnote{FOSS4G Denver Call for Papers: \url{http://2011.foss4g.org/blog/2011/2/3/call-for-presentations-under-way.html}}
\subsection{FOSSGIS 2011 - Heidelberg}
FOSSGIS, hosted by the German Local Chapter of OSGeo, is ``the German language sibling of FOSS4G'' - this year it will be held in Heidelberg from 5-7 April. Most talks will be in German, and there will be an exhibition and trade fair of service providers.  More details can be found at the chapter's wiki page on the topic.\footnote{FOSSGIS 2011 - Heidelberg: \url{http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/wiki/Main_Page}}
\subsection{Bolsena Hacking Event 2011}
Those monastic coders are at it again!  The fourth OSGeo hacking event in a monastery in Bolsena, Italy will occur from 19 to 25 June, 2011.  The venue is beautiful and has great facilities, with all meals for the week provided.  There is limited space, however (25 beds), so if you are interested in joining, you are encouraged to sign up soon at the event's wiki page.\footnote{Bolsena Hacking Event 2011: \url{http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Bolsena_Code_Sprint_2011}}
\subsection{Montreal Code Sprint}
An OSGeo code sprint is about to occur in Montreal, Canada, from March 15-18 at the Communaut\'{e} M\'{e}tropolitaine de Montr\'{e}al. Many participants and sponsors have signed up, but there is still room for more.  All OSGeo projects and tribes are welcome and encouraged to join in. More details, links to a mailing list, and a signup page are available from the event's wiki page.\footnote{Montreal Code Sprint: \url{http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Montreal_Code_Sprint_2011}}
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\section{Local OSGeo groups}
The OSGeo Japan chapter has received the ``Japanese OSS Encouragement Award'' prize from the IT Promotion Agency, a Japanese government agency.  This award is granted to developers that establish and manage influential projects, superior developers that take active roles in global projects, and remarkable contributors to the spread of open source software.  The Japan chapter has been active since its formation in late 2006.\footnote{Japan Local Chapter: \url{http://www.osgeo.jp/}}
\section{OSGeo Collaboration}
\subsection{Centre for Geospatial Science and OSGeo sign MoU}
On the 22nd of September, OSGeo and the Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS) at University of Nottingham announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to create an Open Source Geospatial Lab, and to further develop collaborations between academics, industry, and governmental organisations involved in open source GIS and spatial data in the United Kingdom. Arnulf Christl, President of OSGeo, and Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director, have both made it clear that they hope this is the first of many formalized developments in OSGeo's support of educational partnerships. The agreement establishes a laboratory to support OS geospatial technology and training, and will provide internships for promising students.  The first phase of the internship program has been announced.\footnote{CGS Internship Program: \url{http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cgs/news/internships.aspx}}
\section{Project News}
\subsection{deegree}
The deegree project\footnote{The deegree project: \url{http://wiki.deegree.org/}} announced a new major release (3.0 - ``Celsius'') to correspond with the project's tenth anniversary. Deegree is a Java-based library for spatial data infrastructures and other web-based geographic services, with full implementation of the OGC WMS, WFS, WPS, and CS-W protocols. High performance moving large amounts of data was a focus of this release, as well as complex applications, support for all relevant GML versions, and advanced integrated development tools. A preconfigured application called inspireNode offers the capability to rapidly deploy a fully transactional WFS and WMS server rendering INSPIRE styling rules on-the-fly.
\subsection{Geomajas}
In November, OSGeo announced that the Geomajas project has graduated from incubation, making it a full-fledged OSGeo project.  This enterprise-ready GIS framework for client-server display and editing of geographic data is implemented in Java, supports OGC standards, and can be downloaded from \href{geomajas.org}{http://www.geomajas.org}.
\subsection{GDAL}
On January 23rd, the GDAL community announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.8.0, the library and command line tools for accessing a wide range of geospatial raster and vector file formats, databases and web services. This is a major new feature release, with highlights including 26 new format drivers, significant improvements to the DXF and GML drivers, implementation of 6 RFCs developed by the community, and a new command line utility, \texttt{gdallocationinfo}.  Details about the release can be read online.\footnote{GDAL/OGR Release 1.8.0: \url{http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/Release/1.8.0-News}}
\subsection{GeoNetwork}
The GeoNetwork team has released GeoNetwork Open Source version 2.6.0 (since updated to 2.6.2\footnote{GeoNetwork 2.6.2: \url{https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/}}).  GeoNetwork is a standards based catalog application to assist the web publication of geospatial data, and is used in a number of Spatial Data infrastructure projects around the world. Highlights of new or improved functionality include performance improvements on search and indexing, an INSPIRE search panel and metadata viewer, an OpenLayers embedded web map viewer, multilingual support, keyword and coordinate reference system selection panels, advanced data and metadata exporting, metadata relations management, advanced schema and schematron validation of metadata, and visual warnings in the metadata editor.
\subsection{Ingres Geospatial}
The Ingres Geospatial community project has released binaries for Ingres 10.1 with built-in new OGC Simple Features-based geospatial support. The software has been released under the GPL version 2 license, making it free to download, develop against, modify and redistribute. Installers are available\footnote{Ingres Geospatial Installers: \url{http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/content/ingres-101-geospatial-support-available}}, as well as a project wiki.\footnote{Ingres Geospatial Pproject wiki: \url{http://community.ingres.com/wiki/IngresGeospatial}}  Ingres Geospatial incorporates many OSGeo projects including PROJ.4 and GEOS, and Ingres is supported by (or work on this support is in progress for) GDAL/OGR, GeoTools, MapServer, Drupal and other common tools in the OS geospatial world.  Ingres has also been a sponsor of OSGeo, GDAL/OGR, and FOSS4G2010.
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