“Building FOSS4G friendly ecosystem in Central Europe”
2019-08-30, 10:00–10:20, Menuet Room

In the Czech republic and countries in the central-east European region, the market share of the open source software for geospatial is on very slowly ascending curve. We asked a question, what is the market missing, so that the acceptance of the FOSS4G software could be done in much faster way?

We came into several conclusions:

  • Public administration does miss technical support
  • Both do need training courses, to pass her required set of skills as fast as possible
  • Current status of the FOSS4G software is still relatively diverse and the interoperability in some fields is unsatisfied, even though it's already manageable

Helping the FOSS4G software to grow into public administration organisations as well as into private sector, we started to work on an ecosystem, where users will find

  • Training capacities
  • Technical support
  • Single point of contact for the development communities

This talk is about history of building the ecosystem in the region of the Czech republic, about activities of GISMentors open training initiative and what we do for the ecosystem to grow. Several numbers will be presented about the market and it's development during last five years.