[Talk-in] session at IRS

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

hi,

we had a one day work shop on opensource gis at the Institute of Remote 
Sensing at Anna University, Chennai. The workshop was jointly organised by 
NRC-FOSS, IRS and Kcube (a gis company that is moving into the open source 
space). Audience consisted of industry and academic professionals - all of 
them used to using software costing crores to produce unusable crap. About a 
100 of them. There were presentations by Kcube, a guy working on village stuff, 
Ravikumar, joint-secy of OSGEO India and me. Ravikumar has impeccable academic 
and industry credentials, and he softened them up - I spoke on OSM. None of 
them had ever heard of Open Source or OSM before. They could not believe their 
ears (or eyes). You mean your data is free? actually free? we can use it in 
commercial apps without paying??? Finally I asked a question - how many of you 
are going to contribute to OSM? Fully half of them raised their hands! Maybe 
atleast 5-10 will do so. The upshot is that the IRS students want a full day 
workshop on OSM on the 23rd - people in Chennai please rally around to help 
conduct it.

-- 
regards
Kenneth Gonsalves
Senior Project Officer
NRC-FOSS
http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/