As of a couple of days ago, the UK local chapter of OSGeo is now official, rather than “in formation”. Thanks to the board for passing our proposal. It might not seem much to some people, but to me it feels an awful lot easier to persuade sceptics and doubters that there is an open source GIS “scene” in the UK with an officially recognised chapter. For information, these are our terms of reference:

• To provide a forum for discussion and promotion of Open Source Geospatial Software in the UK, and provide networking opportunities for developers and users

• To help more UK organisations discover the opportunity of open source geospatial tools, and collate business studies of successful transitions

• To raise awareness of the benefits of public access to geodata in the UK by collating links to sources of legitimate free data

In addition we would like to work towards the following:

• A fully-featured open access UK SDI

• Someday hosting the FOSS4G conference in the UK

If you’re interested, do check out the wiki and come to our conference in June!