In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

As much important as the job we do, is with whom we do it. Our work environment matters. What also matters to most of us is feeling part of a larger community, in that case, the geospatial community. Yesterday, I felt part of it again for a few hours. It was the welcoming event of this week's OSGeo Montreal Code Sprint 2011. I am not contributing to the code sprint itself, but it's always nice to chat with fellow geospatial professionals that we haven't seen for a while and meet new people. It's surprising to notice how small the world is. We were even lucky to be honored by the presence of three Sol Katz Award recipients at the event. Clearly, it felt good to participate to such a 'get together', even if it's just for a few hours. It helps us wait for the next geospatial conference! ;-)

In Fall 2006 I shared some thoughts on what is the geospatial community, and later in Summer 2007, there was a few entries over the geoblogs on the state of the geospatial community (apologies, we haven't migrated the user comments of our old stories after our move to Drupal in Summer 2010, causing user comments not showing up on those stories). When we launched Slashgeo.org in 2005 under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, we hoped it would draw the community to share even more on this virtual space. Fast forward to 2011, judging by the low frequency of user comments on the site, it's obvious that we failed that part of the dream. But with our relatively significant readership (over 5,000 subscribers just in Google Reader, a number anyone can easily validate), I guess the geonews aggregation services we provide are not entirely useless. And hey, maybe someday community participation on the site will take off and reach orbit? It doesn't matter that much to me now, sometimes the voyage is more important than the destination! And in this voyage, when we look around, we are not alone, we are a spatial community after all.