Given the evidence that someone is spreading the "information" that gisEIEL project is dead and that, henceforth, it is to be replaced by Open gisEIEL, we want to make it clear that BOTH STATEMENTS ARE RADICALLY FALSE.
Whoever is from now on the main developers group and what is the type of contract or collaboration of this group, the project is still being directed and led by the A Coruña Province Council, which, through the Technical Monitoring Committee of the project, will continue to have ultimate capacity of decision on the actions carried out on it. No one outside of A Coruña Province Council may therefore decide whether the project continues or not or if it is to be replaced by another one.
In short: gisEIEL currently is and will remain being alive.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Desmentido
Ante la evidencia de que se está extendiendo la "información" de que el proyecto gisEIEL está muerto y que, a partir de ahora, pasa a ser sustituído por Open gisEIEL, queremos dejar claro que AMBAS AFIRMACIONES SON RADICALMENTE FALSAS.
Independientemente de quien sea a partir de ahora el grupo principal de desarrollo y cuál sea la modalidad de contratación o colaboración de ese grupo, el proyecto sigue siendo dirigido y liderado por la Diputación de A Coruña, que, a través de la Comisión Técnica de Seguimiento del proyecto, continuará teniendo la capacidad última de decisión sobre las actuaciones que se realicen sobre el mismo. Nadie ajeno a la Diputación de A Coruña puede, por tanto, decidir si el proyecto continúa o no o si es sustituído por otro.
En resumen: gisEIEL está y continuará estando vivo.
Independientemente de quien sea a partir de ahora el grupo principal de desarrollo y cuál sea la modalidad de contratación o colaboración de ese grupo, el proyecto sigue siendo dirigido y liderado por la Diputación de A Coruña, que, a través de la Comisión Técnica de Seguimiento del proyecto, continuará teniendo la capacidad última de decisión sobre las actuaciones que se realicen sobre el mismo. Nadie ajeno a la Diputación de A Coruña puede, por tanto, decidir si el proyecto continúa o no o si es sustituído por otro.
En resumen: gisEIEL está y continuará estando vivo.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Pherecyde's cloth (I): The cloth
Greek pre-socratic philosopher Pherecides of Syros (6th BC) [1] did explain the origin of the World, as we know it, by means of a myth.
Accordingly to him, in the origin there was the chaos inhabitted by two antagonistic "entities" or "forces": Chtonie (the solid materials) and Ogenos (the oceans or, more exactly, the waters) which would exist in a complete separation from one eachother, with no contact between them.
Zas (laterly known as Zeus, the father of Gods) would have put order into this initial chaos by fostering the meeting between these two entities and their later union, which is poetically described by Pherecydes as their "wedding".
As wedding present, Zas would have woven a large, beautiful cloth in which he would have represented, at a natural scale, earth and seas and all what they contain: geographical elements, animals, plants, minerals, atmosphere, as well as the sun, the moon, the stars, etc.
After the wedding between Chtonie and Ogenos, he would have laid the cloth on them, this way transforming Chtonie into Gea, and chaos into order. And, as a consequence, creating the World in which we now live.
By means of the act of covering the chaos with a representation of the "ordered" world, the model of the world would have become the world itself. Or, in other words (now mine, not from Pherecydes): The mapping of the world at a natural scale would have caused its actual creation.
Beautiful, isn it? Mainly if we read the legend from our perspective: the one of those who work with geographic information.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pherecydes_of_Syros
Accordingly to him, in the origin there was the chaos inhabitted by two antagonistic "entities" or "forces": Chtonie (the solid materials) and Ogenos (the oceans or, more exactly, the waters) which would exist in a complete separation from one eachother, with no contact between them.
Zas (laterly known as Zeus, the father of Gods) would have put order into this initial chaos by fostering the meeting between these two entities and their later union, which is poetically described by Pherecydes as their "wedding".
As wedding present, Zas would have woven a large, beautiful cloth in which he would have represented, at a natural scale, earth and seas and all what they contain: geographical elements, animals, plants, minerals, atmosphere, as well as the sun, the moon, the stars, etc.
After the wedding between Chtonie and Ogenos, he would have laid the cloth on them, this way transforming Chtonie into Gea, and chaos into order. And, as a consequence, creating the World in which we now live.
By means of the act of covering the chaos with a representation of the "ordered" world, the model of the world would have become the world itself. Or, in other words (now mine, not from Pherecydes): The mapping of the world at a natural scale would have caused its actual creation.
Beautiful, isn it? Mainly if we read the legend from our perspective: the one of those who work with geographic information.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pherecydes_of_Syros
Monday, December 14, 2009
Liberación de la versión 2.1 de gisEIEL
En el día de hoy se ha procedido a liberar el código de la última versión de gisEIEL, la 2.1, que incorpora notables mejoras.
El código fuente de la aplicación así como toda la documentación de desarrollo está accesible desde la web de la EIEL en el siguiente enlace:
También podéis acceder a una descripción del proyecto en la página de OSOR:
Los cambios de esta versión con respecto a la anterior incluyen revisiones/mejoras de los módulos existentes así como nuevas funcionalidades para la aplicación.
A continuación incluimos una descripción de las principales novedades de esta versión.
Mejoras de carácter general:
· Se han corregido los errores detectados por los usuarios así como por el equipo de desarrollo, mejorando la estabilidad general de la aplicación.
· Se han reestructurado los menús para que sea más cómodo e intuitivo su uso.
· Se ha mejorado notablemente la organización de los proyectos así como sus dependencias y se han simplificado los ficheros de ‘ant’ necesarios para compilarlos.
Mejoras en los módulos existentes:
· Módulo de autenticación y gestión de usuarios:
1. Se ha incluido una caché de servidores que permite almacenar los datos de conexión a los servidores a los que se ha accedido de forma exitosa.
· Módulo de impresión:
2. Corregidos los problemas de consumo de memoria que impedían imprimir con calidad muy alta
3. Posibilidad de imprimir a 96, 300 y 600 ppp
4. Posibilidad de poder imprimir en horizontal y vertical
5. Nuevos tamaños de impresión, ahora la aplicación soporta A0, A1, A2, A3 y A4.
6. Incluido módulo de gestión de leyendas de impresión que permite configurar el nombre de cada capa EIEL que aparecerá en la leyenda del mapa impreso.
· Módulo de digitalización y edición.
1. Añadida herramienta de edición de polígonos que permite añadir polígonos o huecos a una entidad con geometría de tipo multipolígono.
2. Añadida herramienta de edición que permite cambiar el sentido de geometrías de tipo polilínea.
· Módulo de formularios de entidad:
1. Incluido soporte a subformularios. De esta forma es posible definir formularios desde los que se pueda abrir subformularios para rellenar datos relativos a una entidad. Por ejemplo los formularios de equipamientos nos permitirán abrir subformularios donde podremos gestionar los usos que se le están dando a ese equipamiento.
· Módulo de generación de fichas municipales:
1. Revisadas las fórmulas de índices e indicadores de la ficha.
2. Mejorado el rendimiento del módulo y reducido el tiempo necesario para la generación de las fichas municipales.
Nuevas funcionalidades de la aplicación:
· Asistente para exportar cartografía a SHP y DXF de forma masiva: Permite exportar a SHP y DXF capas de la BDT-EIEL pertenecientes a un conjunto de municipios de forma rápida y cómoda.
· Nuevo módulo de conectividad de redes con las siguientes herramientas:
1. Herramienta para la comprobación de la conectividad de redes de abastecimiento y saneamiento: Permite realizar simulaciones de recorrido de redes sobre las vistas de gvSIG, de forma que facilita la detección de posibles errores en las conexiones de los elementos que forman una red.
2. Herramienta para el cálculo de conectividad para las redes de abastecimiento y saneamiento: permiten calcular de forma automática las asociaciones de servicio entre elementos de las redes de saneamiento y abastecimiento, y los núcleos de población.
· Herramienta para la eliminación de núcleos EIEL: Permite eliminar de forma cómoda núcleos EIEL, reasignando todos los equipamientos e infraestructuras pertenecientes a este núcleo a un nuevo núcleo EIEL indicado por el usuario.
· Módulo de generación de registros temporales que proporciona al usuario herramientas para:
1. Generar en la BDT-EIEL un esquema temporal, un esquema histórico, disparadores y procedimientos almacenados que permitan implementar la gestión temporal de los datos.
2. Guardar registros temporales de las modificaciones de los datos contenidos en la BDT-EIEL, almacenando en el esquema histórico las modificaciones que ha sufrido la BD entre distintos momentos puntuales.
Mejoras en la BDT-EIEL:
· Introducidos datos de fases anteriores de la EIEL, lo que permite análisis históricos de evolución de las infraestructuras y equipamientos.
· Incluido un esquema temporal, un esquema histórico, disparadores y procedimientos almacenados que permitan implementar la gestión temporal de los datos.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Cathedrals or bazaars?
Even I don´t fully agree with Reynold's proposal about Libre Software projects cathegorization [1], as I don't think that cathedrals were completely built by hierarchical organizations, whilst bazaars are not actually "that" collaborative, there is no doubdt that it has been widely adopted by the LS community. Thus thinking about projects as bazaar-like managed is what prevails. And, well, maybe that, in general, this is the case with must LS projects. But, what happens with Public Administration led ones? Do they properly fit bazaar paradigma?
I begun thinking about this issue when we were preparing gisEIEL project releasing, last year. Being the "bible" of LS projects managing, I was then trying to follow Karl Fogel's reccomendations at his well known book "Producing Open Source software" [2]. But as we progressed in gisEIEL releasing tasks, I begun being more and more aware about that our project COULDN'T follow all of those reccomendations. As a consequence, I tried to figure out wether this happened to every PA led project.
To help myself in that task, I launched PA FOSS, a web based enquiry (not currently available) that contained a series of questions regarding all of the main points that Fogel mentions in his book. Even announced at several fora, it was completed just by four project managers (including myself), what can not be considered as statitically representative at all. Anyway, the contents of those four answers are homogeneous enough as to suspect that, when dealing with projects from Public Administration bodies, my thoughts about the existence of constrains to follow bazaar model are something more than just an intuition.
Why do I think so? Well, let's have a look at some of the results of the enquiry:
i. Developing
In all of the four cases, developing is being made by teams from the own leading PA body, its associated institutions or contrated companies. In no case it was made by a free and self organized community.
Developing decissions are, thus, taken by project managing teams.
ii. Project releasing
All of the four projects were firstly released only when they had achieved all of the decided functionality. No alfa, beta or candidate releases. No code sharing until the applications were fully developed and functional enough. And, by the time when the enquiry was held, this applied as well to former versions.
iii. Funding
Again, in no case funding came, not even partially, from the community or from private sources. Developing costs were totally paid with Public Administration funds.
iv. Community
So, is there any "community" around those projects? Well! Yes, it is! But not a self organized one. In general, what exists is a more or less wide series of tools to support the use of the applications and the intercommunication between their users and the project managing team, regarding mainly issues such as news announcement, applications testing, improvement proposals, bug tracking and so on. In some cases (i.e. gisEIEL [3]), there is also a Community Code of Conduct that rules that community's activity.
As said, this pattern does perfectly fit both four projects. Only in the case of gvSIG [4], given its wide success and the fact that its use has spreaded all over the world, the Public Administration body that launched the project (Generalitat Valenciana, in Spain) has begun to feel "over charged" by managing tasks and has been preparing project's total independence and self managing by means of the constitution of an Association that will take care of gvSIG from some time in this year on. From that moment, the project will no more depend on GV decissions and funding and, in the close future, these will only regard the developing of given components that the mentioned institution may be interested in.
But, why does this happen? Why PA lead projects seam to be that tightly dependent on PA bodies decissions and that poorly built on communities activity? Well, PA activities are tightly controled by a broad series of legislative rules that try to assure that they rely, between other principles, on that of the save and care use of public funds and on that PA bodies have always to preserve their prestige and public trusting. This implies that wells, services and products paid with public funds can not be distributed if they do not pass quality and completeness controls. The responsibility (and liability) of PA bodies on those products are clearly higher than in the case of those produced by private institutions. So, regarding PA Libre software projects, "control" is, more than a convenience, an absolute need. If not a legal imposition.
And this makes that a new question arises: are them actually "Libre" projects? In my opinion, must of them are. Freedom does not depend on how much community driven are the projects, but on what are the conditions under which the software is released. As far as they are distributed under an approved "Libre" license, with no added use constrains, for me they are "Libre" themselves. Tighter or looser managed, more or less community driven, but "Libre" anyway.
So, cathedrals or bazaars?
PS: As you probably noticed, I do always use the expresion "Libre Software" instead of "Free Software". That's because I understand that "Free" is quite a more ambiguous word (remember that of "Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", what becomes useless if you simply use "Libre" instead). And, moreover this, "Libre" is independent from any given definition of what can be considered as "free" or "non free" software [5] [6], what IMHO becomes a valuable added value. :-)
[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
[2]: http://producingoss.com/
[3]: http://www.dicoruna.es/webeiel/giseiel/soportecomunidad.do
[4]: http://www.gvsig.org
[5]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[6]: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
I begun thinking about this issue when we were preparing gisEIEL project releasing, last year. Being the "bible" of LS projects managing, I was then trying to follow Karl Fogel's reccomendations at his well known book "Producing Open Source software" [2]. But as we progressed in gisEIEL releasing tasks, I begun being more and more aware about that our project COULDN'T follow all of those reccomendations. As a consequence, I tried to figure out wether this happened to every PA led project.
To help myself in that task, I launched PA FOSS, a web based enquiry (not currently available) that contained a series of questions regarding all of the main points that Fogel mentions in his book. Even announced at several fora, it was completed just by four project managers (including myself), what can not be considered as statitically representative at all. Anyway, the contents of those four answers are homogeneous enough as to suspect that, when dealing with projects from Public Administration bodies, my thoughts about the existence of constrains to follow bazaar model are something more than just an intuition.
Why do I think so? Well, let's have a look at some of the results of the enquiry:
i. Developing
In all of the four cases, developing is being made by teams from the own leading PA body, its associated institutions or contrated companies. In no case it was made by a free and self organized community.
Developing decissions are, thus, taken by project managing teams.
ii. Project releasing
All of the four projects were firstly released only when they had achieved all of the decided functionality. No alfa, beta or candidate releases. No code sharing until the applications were fully developed and functional enough. And, by the time when the enquiry was held, this applied as well to former versions.
iii. Funding
Again, in no case funding came, not even partially, from the community or from private sources. Developing costs were totally paid with Public Administration funds.
iv. Community
So, is there any "community" around those projects? Well! Yes, it is! But not a self organized one. In general, what exists is a more or less wide series of tools to support the use of the applications and the intercommunication between their users and the project managing team, regarding mainly issues such as news announcement, applications testing, improvement proposals, bug tracking and so on. In some cases (i.e. gisEIEL [3]), there is also a Community Code of Conduct that rules that community's activity.
As said, this pattern does perfectly fit both four projects. Only in the case of gvSIG [4], given its wide success and the fact that its use has spreaded all over the world, the Public Administration body that launched the project (Generalitat Valenciana, in Spain) has begun to feel "over charged" by managing tasks and has been preparing project's total independence and self managing by means of the constitution of an Association that will take care of gvSIG from some time in this year on. From that moment, the project will no more depend on GV decissions and funding and, in the close future, these will only regard the developing of given components that the mentioned institution may be interested in.
But, why does this happen? Why PA lead projects seam to be that tightly dependent on PA bodies decissions and that poorly built on communities activity? Well, PA activities are tightly controled by a broad series of legislative rules that try to assure that they rely, between other principles, on that of the save and care use of public funds and on that PA bodies have always to preserve their prestige and public trusting. This implies that wells, services and products paid with public funds can not be distributed if they do not pass quality and completeness controls. The responsibility (and liability) of PA bodies on those products are clearly higher than in the case of those produced by private institutions. So, regarding PA Libre software projects, "control" is, more than a convenience, an absolute need. If not a legal imposition.
And this makes that a new question arises: are them actually "Libre" projects? In my opinion, must of them are. Freedom does not depend on how much community driven are the projects, but on what are the conditions under which the software is released. As far as they are distributed under an approved "Libre" license, with no added use constrains, for me they are "Libre" themselves. Tighter or looser managed, more or less community driven, but "Libre" anyway.
So, cathedrals or bazaars?
PS: As you probably noticed, I do always use the expresion "Libre Software" instead of "Free Software". That's because I understand that "Free" is quite a more ambiguous word (remember that of "Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", what becomes useless if you simply use "Libre" instead). And, moreover this, "Libre" is independent from any given definition of what can be considered as "free" or "non free" software [5] [6], what IMHO becomes a valuable added value. :-)
[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
[2]: http://producingoss.com/
[3]: http://www.dicoruna.es/webeiel/giseiel/soportecomunidad.do
[4]: http://www.gvsig.org
[5]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[6]: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
Friday, February 20, 2009
SIGNERGIAS (II)_en
One month and one half after we SIGNERGIAS, workshop took place, I'm pleased to announce the its main consequence has been the launching of SIGNERGIAS Network. This way, what was born as a punctual event has evolved into an organization with the aim of persistence in time.
All of the information regarding the network is already available at its web site [1], as well as the minutes of the first meeting and the aditional documentation.
Next meeting: during Libre SIG Workshop at Girona next month.
SIGNERGIAS (II)_es
Mes y medio más tarde de haber celebrado el taller SIGNERGIAS, me cabe el placer de anunciar que el principal resultado de dicho taller ha sido la constitución de la RED SIGNERGIAS, de tal manera que lo que nació como una experiencia puntual se convierte así en una organización con voluntad de permanencia en el tiempo.
Toda la información está ya disponible en su sede web [1], junto con el acta de la reunión celebrada y la documentación adicional.
Próxima reunión: Durante las Jornadas de SIG Libre, en Girona.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Signergias.en
After several months of not publishing any new posts at this blog, I'm back to announce the holding of signergias , workshop during which we pretend establishing the basements for the mutual collaboration between the four main Libre GIS projects in Spain: gvSIG, gisEIEL, LocalGIS e IDEACV, by focusing on the integration of municipal managing utilities and on their interoperability, in order to avoid parallel developings and the consequent duplicities.
At workshop's site we will publish every documentation that is developed along it, and at this blog we will post all of the news that may surge regarding this issue.
At workshop's site we will publish every documentation that is developed along it, and at this blog we will post all of the news that may surge regarding this issue.
Signergias.es
Tras un parón de unos meses en la incorporación de entradas a este blog (que no de trabajo en gisEIEL), vuelvo para anunciaros la próxima celebración de signergias , taller en el que pretendemos sentar las bases para la colaboración mutua entre los cuatro principales proyectos españoles de SIG libre: gvSIG, gisEIEL, LocalGIS e IDEACV, con el foco puesto en la integración de utilidades de gestión municipal y en su interoperabilidad, a fin de evitar desarrollos paralelos y las consiguientes duplicidades.
En la web del taller iremos publicando toda la documentación que se genere durante la celebración del mismo, y en este blog os iremos aportando las noticias que vayan surgiendo sobre dicho tema.
En la web del taller iremos publicando toda la documentación que se genere durante la celebración del mismo, y en este blog os iremos aportando las noticias que vayan surgiendo sobre dicho tema.
Monday, October 20, 2008
About the future of this blog
Hi again!
This posting will suppose a change in the course that this blog has been following this far.
'Going Free' was born as part of my practicum at Libre Software Master, held by Caixanova, Igalia and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It would be the log of my work regarding the releasing of gisEIEL project. And, being an accademic exercise, it would:
A crazy experiment? Well, maybe! But as in the song:
This posting will suppose a change in the course that this blog has been following this far.
'Going Free' was born as part of my practicum at Libre Software Master, held by Caixanova, Igalia and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It would be the log of my work regarding the releasing of gisEIEL project. And, being an accademic exercise, it would:
- Be personally (and exclusively) written by me
- Relate only to gisEIEL project, and
- Be written in English (Yes, that was the very reason! What were you thinking of? :-D )
A crazy experiment? Well, maybe! But as in the song:
The future will tell us
¿Qué será, será?
(or "Che sará, sará?", depending on the versions)
What will be, will be?
We don't believe in misticisms, but we strongly believe in "mestizaje". And as 'Blade Runner' followers, we also believe in "interlingua" ;-)
Our project is not very big, at least by the moment, and this fact will (I hope) let us keep things under control.
Finally, even still focused on gisEIEL, this blog may be open to other subjects. But always (and this is a promise) relating to GIS and Libre Software realms.
So: Farewell, you old blog! Wellcome (bienvenido, benvido, benvenutto, benvingut, welkome, willkomen,...) new 'Going Free'!
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